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Documents authored by Romana, Giuseppe

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13
Totally Unclustered BWT Images of Any Length over Non-Binary Alphabets

Authors: Gabriele Fici, Estéban Gabory, Giuseppe Romana, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 369, 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)

Abstract
We prove that for every integer n > 0 and for every alphabet Σ_k of size k ≥ 3, there exist words of length n whose Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is totally unclustered, i.e., it consists of exactly n runs with no two consecutive equal symbols. These words represent the worst-case behavior of the clustering effect of the BWT. We also establish a lower bound on their number. This contrasts with the binary case, where the existence of infinitely many totally unclustered BWT images is still an open problem, related to Artin’s conjecture on primitive roots.
Cite as

Gabriele Fici, Estéban Gabory, Giuseppe Romana, and Marinella Sciortino. Totally Unclustered BWT Images of Any Length over Non-Binary Alphabets. In 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 369, pp. 13:1-13:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{fici_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13,
  author =	{Fici, Gabriele and Gabory, Est\'{e}ban and Romana, Giuseppe and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{Totally Unclustered BWT Images of Any Length over Non-Binary Alphabets}},
  booktitle =	{37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)},
  pages =	{13:1--13:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-420-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{369},
  editor =	{Bille, Philip and Prezza, Nicola},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259399},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler Transform, BWT-runs, Repetitiveness Measure, Clustering Effect, Generalized de Bruijn Words}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.49
Morphisms and BWT-Run Sensitivity

Authors: Gabriele Fici, Giuseppe Romana, Marinella Sciortino, and Cristian Urbina

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 345, 50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025)

Abstract
We study how the application of morphisms affects the number r of equal-letter runs in the Burrows–Wheeler Transform (BWT). This parameter has emerged as a key repetitiveness measure in compressed indexing. We focus on the notion of BWT-run sensitivity after application of morphisms. For binary alphabets, we characterize the class of injective morphisms that preserve the number of BWT-runs up to a bounded additive increase by showing that it coincides with the known class of primitivity-preserving morphisms, which are those that map primitive words to primitive words. We further prove that deciding whether a given binary morphism has bounded BWT-run sensitivity is possible in polynomial time with respect to the total length of the images of the two letters. Additionally, we explore new structural and combinatorial properties of synchronizing and recognizable morphisms. These results establish new connections between BWT-based compressibility, code theory, and symbolic dynamics.
Cite as

Gabriele Fici, Giuseppe Romana, Marinella Sciortino, and Cristian Urbina. Morphisms and BWT-Run Sensitivity. In 50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 345, pp. 49:1-49:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{fici_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.49,
  author =	{Fici, Gabriele and Romana, Giuseppe and Sciortino, Marinella and Urbina, Cristian},
  title =	{{Morphisms and BWT-Run Sensitivity}},
  booktitle =	{50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025)},
  pages =	{49:1--49:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-388-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{345},
  editor =	{Gawrychowski, Pawe{\l} and Mazowiecki, Filip and Skrzypczak, Micha{\l}},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.49},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-241567},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.49},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler transform, BWT-runs, morphism, pure code, repetitiveness}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.1
BWT and Combinatorics on Words

Authors: Gabriele Fici, Sabrina Mantaci, Antonio Restivo, Giuseppe Romana, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 131, The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday (2025)

Abstract
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a reversible transformation on words (strings) introduced in 1994 in the context of data compression, which is a permutation of the characters in the word. Its clustering effect, i.e., the remarkable property of grouping identical characters (BWT runs) when they share common contexts, has made it a powerful tool for boosting compression performances and enabling efficient pattern searching in highly repetitive string collections. In this chapter, we analyze the Burrows-Wheeler transform under the combinatorial point of view, and we survey known properties and connections with different aspects of combinatorics on words. In particular, we focus on the properties of words in relation to the number of their BWT runs. The value r, which counts the number of BWT runs, impacts both compression performance and indexing efficiency, and is considered a measure to evaluate the above-mentioned clustering effect and, consequently, the repetitiveness of a word. We give an overview of the results relating r to other combinatorial repetitiveness measures related to the factor complexity. The chapter also explores extremal cases of the clustering effect. Finally, some results on the sensitivity of the measure r are considered, where the effects of combinatorial operations are studied, such as reversal, edits, and the application of morphisms.
Cite as

Gabriele Fici, Sabrina Mantaci, Antonio Restivo, Giuseppe Romana, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino. BWT and Combinatorics on Words. In The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 131, pp. 1:1-1:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{fici_et_al:OASIcs.Manzini.1,
  author =	{Fici, Gabriele and Mantaci, Sabrina and Restivo, Antonio and Romana, Giuseppe and Rosone, Giovanna and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{BWT and Combinatorics on Words}},
  booktitle =	{The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{1:1--1:23},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-390-4},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{131},
  editor =	{Ferragina, Paolo and Gagie, Travis and Navarro, Gonzalo},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.1},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239090},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.1},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler Transform, Combinatorics on Words, Clustering Effect, BWT Runs}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2023.10
On the Impact of Morphisms on BWT-Runs

Authors: Gabriele Fici, Giuseppe Romana, Marinella Sciortino, and Cristian Urbina

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 259, 34th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2023)

Abstract
Morphisms are widely studied combinatorial objects that can be used for generating infinite families of words. In the context of Information theory, injective morphisms are called (variable length) codes. In Data compression, the morphisms, combined with parsing techniques, have been recently used to define new mechanisms to generate repetitive words. Here, we show that the repetitiveness induced by applying a morphism to a word can be captured by a compression scheme based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT). In fact, we prove that, differently from other compression-based repetitiveness measures, the measure r_bwt (which counts the number of equal-letter runs produced by applying BWT to a word) strongly depends on the applied morphism. More in detail, we characterize the binary morphisms that preserve the value of r_bwt(w), when applied to any binary word w containing both letters. They are precisely the Sturmian morphisms, which are well-known objects in Combinatorics on words. Moreover, we prove that it is always possible to find a binary morphism that, when applied to any binary word containing both letters, increases the number of BWT-equal letter runs by a given (even) number. In addition, we derive a method for constructing arbitrarily large families of binary words on which BWT produces a given (even) number of new equal-letter runs. Such results are obtained by using a new class of morphisms that we call Thue-Morse-like. Finally, we show that there exist binary morphisms μ for which it is possible to find words w such that the difference r_bwt(μ(w))-r_bwt(w) is arbitrarily large.
Cite as

Gabriele Fici, Giuseppe Romana, Marinella Sciortino, and Cristian Urbina. On the Impact of Morphisms on BWT-Runs. In 34th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 259, pp. 10:1-10:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

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@InProceedings{fici_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2023.10,
  author =	{Fici, Gabriele and Romana, Giuseppe and Sciortino, Marinella and Urbina, Cristian},
  title =	{{On the Impact of Morphisms on BWT-Runs}},
  booktitle =	{34th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2023)},
  pages =	{10:1--10:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-276-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{259},
  editor =	{Bulteau, Laurent and Lipt\'{a}k, Zsuzsanna},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2023.10},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-179641},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2023.10},
  annote =	{Keywords: Morphism, Burrows-Wheeler transform, Sturmian word, Sturmian morphism, Thue-Morse morphism, Repetitiveness measure}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2022.22
Computing Maximal Unique Matches with the r-Index

Authors: Sara Giuliani, Giuseppe Romana, and Massimiliano Rossi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 233, 20th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2022)

Abstract
In recent years, pangenomes received increasing attention from the scientific community for their ability to incorporate population variation information and alleviate reference genome bias. Maximal Exact Matches (MEMs) and Maximal Unique Matches (MUMs) have proven themselves to be useful in multiple bioinformatic contexts, for example short-read alignment and multiple-genome alignment. However, standard techniques using suffix trees and FM-indexes do not scale to a pangenomic level. Recently, Gagie et al. [JACM 20] introduced the r-index that is a Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT)-based index able to handle hundreds of human genomes. Later, Rossi et al. [JCB 22] enabled the computation of MEMs using the r-index, and Boucher et al. [DCC 21] showed how to compute them in a streaming fashion. In this paper, we show how to augment Boucher et al.’s approach to enable the computation of MUMs on the r-index, while preserving the space and time bounds. We add additional O(r) samples of the longest common prefix (LCP) array, where r is the number of equal-letter runs of the BWT, that permits the computation of the second longest match of the pattern suffix with respect to the input text, which in turn allows the computation of candidate MUMs. We implemented a proof-of-concept of our approach, that we call MUM-PHINDER, and tested on real-world datasets. We compared our approach with competing methods that are able to compute MUMs. We observe that our method is up to 8 times smaller, while up to 19 times slower when the dataset is not highly repetitive, while on highly repetitive data, our method is up to 6.5 times slower and uses up to 25 times less memory.
Cite as

Sara Giuliani, Giuseppe Romana, and Massimiliano Rossi. Computing Maximal Unique Matches with the r-Index. In 20th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 233, pp. 22:1-22:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)

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@InProceedings{giuliani_et_al:LIPIcs.SEA.2022.22,
  author =	{Giuliani, Sara and Romana, Giuseppe and Rossi, Massimiliano},
  title =	{{Computing Maximal Unique Matches with the r-Index}},
  booktitle =	{20th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2022)},
  pages =	{22:1--22:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-251-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2022},
  volume =	{233},
  editor =	{Schulz, Christian and U\c{c}ar, Bora},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2022.22},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-165568},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2022.22},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler Transform, r-index, maximal unique matches, bioinformatics, pangenomics}
}
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