Bidirectional Text Compression in External Memory

Bidirectional compression algorithms work by substituting repeated substrings by references that, unlike in the famous LZ77-scheme, can point to either direction. We present such an algorithm that is particularly suited for an external memory implementation. We evaluate it experimentally on large data sets of size up to 128 GiB (using only 16 GiB of RAM) and show that it is significantly faster than all known LZ77 compressors, while producing a roughly similar number of factors. We also introduce an external memory decompressor for texts compressed with any uni- or bidirectional compression scheme

On the Complexity of Grammar-Based Compression over Fixed Alphabets

It is shown that the shortest-grammar problem remains NP-complete if the alphabet is fixed and has a size of at least 24 (which settles an open question). On the other hand, this problem can be solved in polynomial-time, if the number of nonterminals is bounded, which is shown by encoding the problem as a problem on graphs with interval structure. Furthermore, we present an O(3n) exact exponential-time algorithm, based on dynamic programming. Similar results are also given for 1-level grammars, i.e., grammars for which only the start rule contains nonterminals on the right side (thus, investigating the impact of the "hierarchical depth" on the complexity of the shortest-grammar problem)

Encoding Hard String Problems with Answer Set Programming

Despite the simple, one-dimensional nature of strings, several computationally hard problems on strings are known. Tackling hard problems beyond sizes of toy instances with straight-forward solutions is infeasible. To solve these problems on datasets of even small sizes, effort has to be put into the conception of algorithms leveraging profound characteristics of the input. Finding these characteristics can be eased by rapidly creating and evaluating prototypes of new concepts in how to tackle hard problems. Such a rapid-prototyping method for hard problems is answer set programming (ASP). In this light, we study the application of ASP on five NP-hard optimization problems in the field of strings. We provide MAX-SAT and ASP encodings, and empirically reason about the merits and flaws when working with ASP solvers