Pattern matching in Lempel-Ziv compressed strings: fast, simple, and deterministic

Countless variants of the Lempel-Ziv compression are widely used in many real-life applications. This paper is concerned with a natural modification of the classical pattern matching problem inspired by the popularity of such compression methods: given an uncompressed pattern s[1..m] and a Lempel-Ziv representation of a string t[1..N], does s occur in t? Farach and Thorup gave a randomized O(nlog^2(N/n)+m) time solution for this problem, where n is the size of the compressed representation of t. We improve their result by developing a faster and fully deterministic O(nlog(N/n)+m) time algorithm with the same space complexity. Note that for highly compressible texts, log(N/n) might be of order n, so for such inputs the improvement is very significant. A (tiny) fragment of our method can be used to give an asymptotically optimal solution for the substring hashing problem considered by Farach and Muthukrishnan.Comment: submitte

Tying up the loose ends in fully LZW-compressed pattern matching

We consider a natural generalization of the classical pattern matching problem: given compressed representations of a pattern p[1..M] and a text t[1..N] of sizes m and n, respectively, does p occur in t? We develop an optimal linear time solution for the case when p and t are compressed using the LZW method. This improves the previously known O((n+m)log(n+m)) time solution of Gasieniec and Rytter, and essentially closes the line of research devoted to tudying LZW-compressed exact pattern matching

LZ77 Factorisation of Trees

We generalise the fundamental concept of LZ77 factorisation from strings to trees. A tree is represented as a collection of edge-disjoint fragments that either consist of one node or has already occurred earlier (in the BFS order). Similarly as for strings, such a collection uniquely determines the tree, so by minimising the number of fragments we obtain a compressed representation of the tree. We show that our generalisation has several useful properties of the standard LZ77 factorisation: it can be computed in polynomial time and its simpler variant in linear time; its size is not larger than the smallest grammar for a tree; it can be transformed (in linear time) into a tree grammar of size O(rg log(n/(rg))), where n is the size of the tree, g the size of the smallest grammar for this tree and r the maximal arity of the nodes in the tree, which matches a recent bound of Jez and Lohrey [STACS 2014], but with a simpler and more modular proof

Edit Distance between Unrooted Trees in Cubic Time

Edit distance between trees is a natural generalization of the classical edit distance between strings, in which the allowed elementary operations are contraction, uncontraction and relabeling of an edge. Demaine et al. [ACM Trans. on Algorithms, 6(1), 2009] showed how to compute the edit distance between rooted trees on n nodes in O(n^3) time. However, generalizing their method to unrooted trees seems quite problematic, and the most efficient known solution remains to be the previous O(n^3 log n) time algorithm by Klein [ESA 1998]. Given the lack of progress on improving this complexity, it might appear that unrooted trees are simply more difficult than rooted trees. We show that this is, in fact, not the case, and edit distance between unrooted trees on n nodes can be computed in O(n^3) time. A significantly faster solution is unlikely to exist, as Bringmann et al. [SODA 2018] proved that the complexity of computing the edit distance between rooted trees cannot be decreased to O(n^{3-epsilon}) unless some popular conjecture fails, and the lower bound easily extends to unrooted trees. We also show that for two unrooted trees of size m and n, where m <=n, our algorithm can be modified to run in O(nm^2(1+log(n/m))). This, again, matches the complexity achieved by Demaine et al. for rooted trees, who also showed that this is optimal if we restrict ourselves to the so-called decomposition algorithms