We express the piecewise complexity of words using tools and concepts from tropical algebra. This allows us to define a notion of piecewise signature of a word that has size log(n)m^{O(1)} where m is the alphabet size and n is the length of the word. The piecewise signature of a concatenation can be computed from the signatures of its components, allowing a polynomial-time algorithm for computing the piecewise complexity of SLP-compressed words.
@InProceedings{schnoebelen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.171, author = {Schnoebelen, Philippe and Veron, J. and Vialard, Isa}, title = {{A Tropical Approach to the Compositional Piecewise Complexity of Words and Compressed Words}}, booktitle = {52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)}, pages = {171:1--171:19}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-372-0}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2025}, volume = {334}, editor = {Censor-Hillel, Keren and Grandoni, Fabrizio and Ouaknine, Jo\"{e}l and Puppis, Gabriele}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.171}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-235481}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.171}, annote = {Keywords: Tropical semiring, Subwords and subsequences, piecewise complexity, SLP-compressed words} }
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