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The longest common extension (LCE) problem is to preprocess a given string w of length n so that the length of the longest common prefix between suffixes of w that start at any two given positions is answered quickly. In this paper, we present a data structure of O(z \tau^2 + \frac{n}{\tau}) words of space which answers LCE queries in O(1) time and can be built in O(n \log \sigma) time, where 1 \leq \tau \leq \sqrt{n} is a parameter, z is the size of the Lempel-Ziv 77 factorization of w and \sigma is the alphabet size. The proposed LCE data structure not access the input string w when answering queries, and thus w can be deleted after preprocessing. On top of this main result, we obtain further results using (variants of) our LCE data structure, which include the following:
- For highly repetitive strings where the z\tau^2 term is dominated by \frac{n}{\tau}, we obtain a constant-time and sub-linear space LCE query data structure.
- Even when the input string is not well compressible via Lempel-Ziv 77 factorization, we still can obtain a constant-time and sub-linear space LCE data structure for suitable \tau and for \sigma \leq 2^{o(\log n)}.
- The time-space trade-off lower bounds for the LCE problem by Bille et al. [J. Discrete Algorithms, 25:42-50, 2014] and by Kosolobov [CoRR, abs/1611.02891, 2016] do not apply in some cases with our LCE data structure.
@InProceedings{tanimura_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2017.10,
author = {Tanimura, Yuka and Nishimoto, Takaaki and Bannai, Hideo and Inenaga, Shunsuke and Takeda, Masayuki},
title = {{Small-Space LCE Data Structure with Constant-Time Queries}},
booktitle = {42nd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2017)},
pages = {10:1--10:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-046-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2017},
volume = {83},
editor = {Larsen, Kim G. and Bodlaender, Hans L. and Raskin, Jean-Francois},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2017.10},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-81021},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2017.10},
annote = {Keywords: longest common extension, truncated suffix trees, t-covers}
}