String Indexing for Patterns with Wildcards

We consider the problem of indexing a string $t$ of length $n$ to report the occurrences of a query pattern $p$ containing $m$ characters and $j$ wildcards. Let $occ$ be the number of occurrences of $p$ in $t$, and $\sigma$ the size of the alphabet. We obtain the following results. - A linear space index with query time $O(m+\sigma^j \log \log n + occ)$. This significantly improves the previously best known linear space index by Lam et al. [ISAAC 2007], which requires query time $\Theta(jn)$ in the worst case. - An index with query time $O(m+j+occ)$ using space $O(\sigma^{k^2} n \log^k \log n)$, where $k$ is the maximum number of wildcards allowed in the pattern. This is the first non-trivial bound with this query time. - A time-space trade-off, generalizing the index by Cole et al. [STOC 2004]. We also show that these indexes can be generalized to allow variable length gaps in the pattern. Our results are obtained using a novel combination of well-known and new techniques, which could be of independent interest

MatchPy: A Pattern Matching Library

Pattern matching is a powerful tool for symbolic computations, based on the well-defined theory of term rewriting systems. Application domains include algebraic expressions, abstract syntax trees, and XML and JSON data. Unfortunately, no lightweight implementation of pattern matching as general and flexible as Mathematica exists for Python Mathics,MacroPy,patterns,PyPatt. Therefore, we created the open source module MatchPy which offers similar pattern matching functionality in Python using a novel algorithm which finds matches for large pattern sets more efficiently by exploiting similarities between patterns.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1710.0007

A Parameterized Study of Maximum Generalized Pattern Matching Problems

The generalized function matching (GFM) problem has been intensively studied starting with [Ehrenfeucht and Rozenberg, 1979]. Given a pattern p and a text t, the goal is to find a mapping from the letters of p to non-empty substrings of t, such that applying the mapping to p results in t. Very recently, the problem has been investigated within the framework of parameterized complexity [Fernau, Schmid, and Villanger, 2013]. In this paper we study the parameterized complexity of the optimization variant of GFM (called Max-GFM), which has been introduced in [Amir and Nor, 2007]. Here, one is allowed to replace some of the pattern letters with some special symbols "?", termed wildcards or don't cares, which can be mapped to an arbitrary substring of the text. The goal is to minimize the number of wildcards used. We give a complete classification of the parameterized complexity of Max-GFM and its variants under a wide range of parameterizations, such as, the number of occurrences of a letter in the text, the size of the text alphabet, the number of occurrences of a letter in the pattern, the size of the pattern alphabet, the maximum length of a string matched to any pattern letter, the number of wildcards and the maximum size of a string that a wildcard can be mapped to.Comment: to appear in Proc. IPEC'1

Quootstrap: Scalable Unsupervised Extraction of Quotation-Speaker Pairs from Large News Corpora via Bootstrapping

We propose Quootstrap, a method for extracting quotations, as well as the names of the speakers who uttered them, from large news corpora. Whereas prior work has addressed this problem primarily with supervised machine learning, our approach follows a fully unsupervised bootstrapping paradigm. It leverages the redundancy present in large news corpora, more precisely, the fact that the same quotation often appears across multiple news articles in slightly different contexts. Starting from a few seed patterns, such as ["Q", said S.], our method extracts a set of quotation-speaker pairs (Q, S), which are in turn used for discovering new patterns expressing the same quotations; the process is then repeated with the larger pattern set. Our algorithm is highly scalable, which we demonstrate by running it on the large ICWSM 2011 Spinn3r corpus. Validating our results against a crowdsourced ground truth, we obtain 90% precision at 40% recall using a single seed pattern, with significantly higher recall values for more frequently reported (and thus likely more interesting) quotations. Finally, we showcase the usefulness of our algorithm's output for computational social science by analyzing the sentiment expressed in our extracted quotations.Comment: Accepted at the 12th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 201

Technology Mapping for Circuit Optimization Using Content-Addressable Memory

The growing complexity of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) is leading to architectures with high input cardinality look-up tables (LUT's). This thesis describes a methodology for area-minimizing technology mapping for combinational logic, specifically designed for such FPGA architectures. This methodology, called LURU, leverages the parallel search capabilities of Content-Addressable Memories (CAM's) to outperform traditional mapping algorithms in both execution time and quality of results. The LURU algorithm is fundamentally different from other techniques for technology mapping in that LURU uses textual string representations of circuit topology in order to efficiently store and search for circuit patterns in a CAM. A circuit is mapped to the target LUT technology using both exact and inexact string matching techniques. Common subcircuit expressions (CSE's) are also identified and used for architectural optimization---a small set of CSE's is shown to effectively cover an average of 96% of the test circuits. LURU was tested with the ISCAS'85 suite of combinational benchmark circuits and compared with the mapping algorithms FlowMap and CutMap. The area reduction shown by LURU is, on average, 20% better compared to FlowMap and CutMap. The asymptotic runtime complexity of LURU is shown to be better than that of both FlowMap and CutMap