Results of the Abbadingo one DFA learning competition and a new evidence-driven state merging algorithm

This paper first describes the structure and results of the Abbadingo One DFA Learning Competition. The competition was designed to encourage work on algorithms that scale well—both to larger DFAs and to sparser training data. We then describe and discuss the winning algorithm of Rodney Price, which orders state merges according to the amount of evidence in their favor. A second winning algorithm, of Hugues Juillé, will be described in a separate paper.