I am a final year undergraduate student at a university and I am doing my final honours project on natural language generation from regular expressions. For this to work efficiently I need to simplify the regular expressions before I translate them. It seems that there is some previous work done on this in Haskell but I have only been able to find this code (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HaLeX-1.1/docs/src/Language-HaLex-RegExp.html​) which does some elementary simplification. 

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to look for more examples so I can see what kinds of attempts people have used to try and solve this problem? Also if someone has worked on this kind of problem was Kleene algebra a good starting point?

Best regards,

Matias