  The paper discusses the problem of determinising finite-state automata
containing large numbers of epsilon-moves. Experiments with finite-state
approximations of natural language grammars often give rise to very large
automata with a very large number of epsilon-moves. The paper identifies three
subset construction algorithms which treat epsilon-moves. A number of
experiments has been performed which indicate that the algorithms differ
considerably in practice. Furthermore, the experiments suggest that the average
number of epsilon-moves per state can be used to predict which algorithm is
likely to perform best for a given input automaton.
