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Documents authored by Sciortino, Marinella

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
Research
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.10
Faster Run-Length Compressed Suffix Arrays

Authors: Nathaniel K. Brown, Travis Gagie, Giovanni Manzini, Gonzalo Navarro, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 132, From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday (2025)

Abstract
We first review how we can store a run-length compressed suffix array (RLCSA) for a text T of length n over an alphabet of size σ whose Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) consists of r runs in O (r log (n / r) + r log σ + σ) bits such that later, given character a and the suffix-array (SA) interval for P, we can find the SA interval for a P in O (log r_a + log log n) time, where r_a is the number of runs of copies of a in the BWT. We then show how to modify the RLCSA such that we find the SA interval for a P in only O (log r_a) time, without increasing its asymptotic space bound. Our key idea is applying a result by Nishimoto and Tabei (ICALP 2021) and then replacing rank queries on sparse bitvectors by a constant number of select queries. We also review two-level indexing and discuss how our faster RLCSA may be useful in improving it. Finally, we briefly discuss how two-level indexing may speed up a recent heuristic for finding maximal exact matches of a pattern with respect to an indexed text.
Cite as

Nathaniel K. Brown, Travis Gagie, Giovanni Manzini, Gonzalo Navarro, and Marinella Sciortino. Faster Run-Length Compressed Suffix Arrays. In From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 132, pp. 10:1-10:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{brown_et_al:OASIcs.Grossi.10,
  author =	{Brown, Nathaniel K. and Gagie, Travis and Manzini, Giovanni and Navarro, Gonzalo and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{Faster Run-Length Compressed Suffix Arrays}},
  booktitle =	{From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{10:1--10:15},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-391-1},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{132},
  editor =	{Conte, Alessio and Marino, Andrea and Rosone, Giovanna and Vitter, Jeffrey Scott},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.10},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238095},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.10},
  annote =	{Keywords: Run-length compressed suffix arrays, interpolative coding, two-level indexing}
}
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/OASIcs.Manzini.3
BWT for String Collections

Authors: Davide Cenzato, Zsuzsanna Lipták, Nadia Pisanti, 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
We survey the different methods used for extending the BWT to collections of strings, following largely [Cenzato and Lipták, CPM 2022, Bioinformatics 2024]. We analyze the specific aspects and combinatorial properties of the resulting BWT variants and give a categorization of publicly available tools for computing the BWT of string collections. We show how the specific method used impacts on the resulting transform, including the number of runs, and on the dynamicity of the transform with respect to adding or removing strings from the collection. We then focus on the number of runs of these BWT variants and present the optimal BWT introduced in [Cenzato et al., DCC 2023], which implements an algorithm originally proposed by [Bentley et al., ESA 2020] to minimize the number of BWT-runs. We also discuss several recent heuristics and study their impact on the compression of biological sequences. We conclude with an overview of the applications and the impact of the BWT of string collections in bioinformatics.
Cite as

Davide Cenzato, Zsuzsanna Lipták, Nadia Pisanti, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino. BWT for String Collections. In The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 131, pp. 3:1-3:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{cenzato_et_al:OASIcs.Manzini.3,
  author =	{Cenzato, Davide and Lipt\'{a}k, Zsuzsanna and Pisanti, Nadia and Rosone, Giovanna and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{BWT for String Collections}},
  booktitle =	{The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{3:1--3:29},
  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.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239113},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler transform, Extended Burrows-Wheeler transform, compressed text indexes, text compression, string collections, bioinformatics}
}
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.CPM.2019.12
A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations

Authors: Raffaele Giancarlo, Giovanni Manzini, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 128, 30th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2019)

Abstract
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform is a string transformation that plays a fundamental role for the design of self-indexing compressed data structures. Over the years, researchers have successfully extended this transformation outside the domains of strings. However, efforts to find non-trivial alternatives of the original, now 25 years old, Burrows-Wheeler string transformation have met limited success. In this paper we bring new lymph to this area by introducing a whole new family of transformations that have all the "myriad virtues" of the BWT: they can be computed and inverted in linear time, they produce provably highly compressible strings, and they support linear time pattern search directly on the transformed string. This new family is a special case of a more general class of transformations based on context adaptive alphabet orderings, a concept introduced here. This more general class includes also the Alternating BWT, another invertible string transforms recently introduced in connection with a generalization of Lyndon words.
Cite as

Raffaele Giancarlo, Giovanni Manzini, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino. A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations. In 30th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 128, pp. 12:1-12:12, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)

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@InProceedings{giancarlo_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2019.12,
  author =	{Giancarlo, Raffaele and Manzini, Giovanni and Rosone, Giovanna and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations}},
  booktitle =	{30th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2019)},
  pages =	{12:1--12:12},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-103-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{128},
  editor =	{Pisanti, Nadia and P. Pissis, Solon},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2019.12},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104833},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2019.12},
  annote =	{Keywords: Data Indexing and Compression, Burrows-Wheeler Transformation, Combinatorics on Words}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2018.3
Detecting Mutations by eBWT

Authors: Nicola Prezza, Nadia Pisanti, Marinella Sciortino, and Giovanna Rosone

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 113, 18th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2018)

Abstract
In this paper we develop a theory describing how the extended Burrows-Wheeler Transform (eBWT) of a collection of DNA fragments tends to cluster together the copies of nucleotides sequenced from a genome G. Our theory accurately predicts how many copies of any nucleotide are expected inside each such cluster, and how an elegant and precise LCP array based procedure can locate these clusters in the eBWT. Our findings are very general and can be applied to a wide range of different problems. In this paper, we consider the case of alignment-free and reference-free SNPs discovery in multiple collections of reads. We note that, in accordance with our theoretical results, SNPs are clustered in the eBWT of the reads collection, and we develop a tool finding SNPs with a simple scan of the eBWT and LCP arrays. Preliminary results show that our method requires much less coverage than state-of-the-art tools while drastically improving precision and sensitivity.
Cite as

Nicola Prezza, Nadia Pisanti, Marinella Sciortino, and Giovanna Rosone. Detecting Mutations by eBWT. In 18th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 113, pp. 3:1-3:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)

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@InProceedings{prezza_et_al:LIPIcs.WABI.2018.3,
  author =	{Prezza, Nicola and Pisanti, Nadia and Sciortino, Marinella and Rosone, Giovanna},
  title =	{{Detecting Mutations by eBWT}},
  booktitle =	{18th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2018)},
  pages =	{3:1--3:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-082-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{113},
  editor =	{Parida, Laxmi and Ukkonen, Esko},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2018.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-93051},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2018.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: BWT, LCP Array, SNPs, Reference-free, Assembly-free}
}
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