siEDM: an efficient string index and search algorithm for edit distance with moves

Although several self-indexes for highly repetitive text collections exist, developing an index and search algorithm with editing operations remains a challenge. Edit distance with moves (EDM) is a string-to-string distance measure that includes substring moves in addition to ordinal editing operations to turn one string into another. Although the problem of computing EDM is intractable, it has a wide range of potential applications, especially in approximate string retrieval. Despite the importance of computing EDM, there has been no efficient method for indexing and searching large text collections based on the EDM measure. We propose the first algorithm, named string index for edit distance with moves (siEDM), for indexing and searching strings with EDM. The siEDM algorithm builds an index structure by leveraging the idea behind the edit sensitive parsing (ESP), an efficient algorithm enabling approximately computing EDM with guarantees of upper and lower bounds for the exact EDM. siEDM efficiently prunes the space for searching query strings by the proposed method, which enables fast query searches with the same guarantee as ESP. We experimentally tested the ability of siEDM to index and search strings on benchmark datasets, and we showed siEDM's efficiency.Comment: 23 page

A Space-Optimal Grammar Compression

A grammar compression is a context-free grammar (CFG) deriving a single string deterministically. For an input string of length N over an alphabet of size sigma, the smallest CFG is O(log N)-approximable in the offline setting and O(log N log^* N)-approximable in the online setting. In addition, an information-theoretic lower bound for representing a CFG in Chomsky normal form of n variables is log (n!/n^sigma) + n + o(n) bits. Although there is an online grammar compression algorithm that directly computes the succinct encoding of its output CFG with O(log N log^* N) approximation guarantee, the problem of optimizing its working space has remained open. We propose a fully-online algorithm that requires the fewest bits of working space asymptotically equal to the lower bound in O(N log log n) compression time. In addition we propose several techniques to boost grammar compression and show their efficiency by computational experiments