  In this paper, we describe a new method for constructing minimal,
deterministic, acyclic finite-state automata from a set of strings. Traditional
methods consist of two phases: the first to construct a trie, the second one to
minimize it. Our approach is to construct a minimal automaton in a single phase
by adding new strings one by one and minimizing the resulting automaton
on-the-fly. We present a general algorithm as well as a specialization that
relies upon the lexicographical ordering of the input strings.
