A New Algorithm for Building Alphabetic Minimax Trees
  We show how to build an alphabetic minimax tree for a sequence (W = w_1, >..., w_n) of real weights in (O (n d \log \log n)) time, where $d$ is the number of distinct integers (\lceil w_i \rceil). We apply this algorithm to building an alphabetic prefix code given a sample. 
Travis Gagie