DROPS

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2026.62

Relative Compressed Reverse Suffix Array

Authors: Muhammed Oguzhan Kulekci, Mano Prakash Parthasarathi, Rahul Shah, and Sharma V. Thankachan

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 364, 43rd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2026)

Abstract

Suffix trees and suffix arrays are two fundamental data structures in the field of string algorithms. For a string (a.k.a. text or sequence) of length n over an alphabet of size σ, these structures typically require O(nlog n) bits of space. The FM-index provides a compressed representation of the suffix array in ≈ nlog σ bits, allowing for efficient queries on both the suffix array and its inverse array in near logarithmic time. In certain applications, such as approximate pattern matching (i.e., with wildcards, mismatches, edits), there is a need to access the suffix array of a text, as well as the suffix array of text’s reverse. Motivated by this, we explore the possibility of encoding the suffix array of the reversed text in a compact form, assuming the availability of the FM-index for the original text. Our first solution is an O(n)-bit (relative) encoding of the suffix array of the reversed text, with the time for decoding an entry being only O(log^*n) times that of decoding an entry in the text’s suffix array using FM-index. We then demonstrate how to reduce the space to O(n/κ) bits for a parameter κ, while multiplicative factor in time becomes approximately O(κlog^*n+κ³). We can also support inverse suffix array and longest common extension queries on the reversed text. These results are achieved through some careful and non-trivial application of various succinct data structure techniques.

Cite as

Muhammed Oguzhan Kulekci, Mano Prakash Parthasarathi, Rahul Shah, and Sharma V. Thankachan. Relative Compressed Reverse Suffix Array. In 43rd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 364, pp. 62:1-62:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{kulekci_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2026.62,
  author =	{Kulekci, Muhammed Oguzhan and Parthasarathi, Mano Prakash and Shah, Rahul and Thankachan, Sharma V.},
  title =	{{Relative Compressed Reverse Suffix Array}},
  booktitle =	{43rd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2026)},
  pages =	{62:1--62:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-412-3},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{364},
  editor =	{Mahajan, Meena and Manea, Florin and McIver, Annabelle and Thắng, Nguy\~{ê}n Kim},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2026.62},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-255512},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2026.62},
  annote =	{Keywords: String Matching, Text Indexing, Data Structures, Suffix Trees}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.7

Sequence Similarity Estimation by Random Subsequence Sketching

Authors: Ke Chen, Vinamratha Pattar, and Mingfu Shao

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 344, 25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025)

Abstract

Sequence similarity estimation is essential for many bioinformatics tasks, including functional annotation, phylogenetic analysis, and overlap graph construction. Alignment-free methods aim to solve large-scale sequence similarity estimation by mapping sequences to more easily comparable features that can approximate edit distances efficiently. Substrings or k-mers, as the dominant choice of features, face an unavoidable compromise between sensitivity and specificity when selecting the proper k-value. Recently, subsequence-based features have shown improved performance, but they are computationally demanding, and determining the ideal subsequence length remains an intricate art. In this work, we introduce SubseqSketch, a novel alignment-free scheme that maps a sequence to an integer vector, where the entries correspond to dynamic, rather than fixed, lengths of random subsequences. The cosine similarity between these vectors exhibits a strong correlation with the edit similarity between the original sequences. Through experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that SubseqSketch is both efficient and effective across various alignment-free tasks, including nearest neighbor search and phylogenetic clustering. A C++ implementation of SubseqSketch is openly available at https://github.com/Shao-Group/SubseqSketch.

Cite as

Ke Chen, Vinamratha Pattar, and Mingfu Shao. Sequence Similarity Estimation by Random Subsequence Sketching. In 25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 344, pp. 7:1-7:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.WABI.2025.7,
  author =	{Chen, Ke and Pattar, Vinamratha and Shao, Mingfu},
  title =	{{Sequence Similarity Estimation by Random Subsequence Sketching}},
  booktitle =	{25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-386-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{344},
  editor =	{Brejov\'{a}, Bro\v{n}a and Patro, Rob},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.7},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239332},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Alignment-free sequence comparison, Phylogenetic clustering, Nearest neighbor search, Edit distance embedding}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.4

Haplotype-Aware Long-Read Error Correction

Authors: Parvesh Barak, Daniel Gibney, and Chirag Jain

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 344, 25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025)

Abstract

Error correction of long reads is an important initial step in genome assembly workflows. For organisms with ploidy greater than one, it is important to preserve haplotype-specific variation during read correction. This challenge has driven the development of several haplotype-aware correction methods. However, existing methods are based on either ad-hoc heuristics or deep learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a rigorous formulation for this problem. Our approach builds on the minimum error correction framework used in reference-based haplotype phasing. We prove that the proposed formulation for error correction of reads in de novo context, i.e., without using a reference genome, is NP-hard. To make our exact algorithm scale to large datasets, we introduce practical heuristics. Experiments using PacBio HiFi sequencing datasets from human and plant genomes show that our approach achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods. The software is freely available at https://github.com/at-cg/HALE.

Cite as

Parvesh Barak, Daniel Gibney, and Chirag Jain. Haplotype-Aware Long-Read Error Correction. In 25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 344, pp. 4:1-4:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{barak_et_al:LIPIcs.WABI.2025.4,
  author =	{Barak, Parvesh and Gibney, Daniel and Jain, Chirag},
  title =	{{Haplotype-Aware Long-Read Error Correction}},
  booktitle =	{25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025)},
  pages =	{4:1--4:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-386-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{344},
  editor =	{Brejov\'{a}, Bro\v{n}a and Patro, Rob},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.4},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239300},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: Genome assembly, phasing, clustering, overlap graph, consensus}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.17

An Efficient Data Structure and Algorithm for Long-Match Query in Run-Length Compressed BWT

Authors: Ahsan Sanaullah, Degui Zhi, and Shaojie Zhang

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 344, 25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025)

Abstract

String matching problems in bioinformatics are typically for finding exact substring matches between a query and a reference text. Previous formulations often focus on maximum exact matches (MEMs). However, multiple occurrences of substrings of the query in the text that are long enough but not maximal may not be captured by MEMs. Such long matches can be informative, especially when the text is a collection of similar sequences such as genomes. In this paper, we describe a new type of match between a pattern and a text that aren't necessarily maximal in the query, but still contain useful matching information: locally maximal exact matches (LEMs). There are usually a large amount of LEMs, so we only consider those above some length threshold ℒ. These are referred to as long LEMs. The purpose of long LEMs is to capture substring matches between a query and a text that are not necessarily maximal in the pattern but still long enough to be important. Therefore efficient long LEMs finding algorithms are desired for these datasets. However, these datasets are too large to query on traditional string indexes. Fortunately, these datasets are very repetitive. Recently, compressed string indexes that take advantage of the redundancy in the data but retain efficient querying capability have been proposed as a solution. We therefore give an efficient algorithm for computing all the long LEMs of a query and a text in a BWT runs compressed string index. We describe an O(m+occ) expected time algorithm that relies on an O(r) words space string index for outputting all long LEMs of a pattern with respect to a text given the matching statistics of the pattern with respect to the text. Here m is the length of the query, occ is the number of long LEMs outputted, and r is the number of runs in the BWT of the text. The O(r) space string index we describe relies on an adaptation of the move data structure by Nishimoto and Tabei. We are able to support LCP[i] queries in constant time given SA[i]. In other words, we answer PLCP[i] queries in constant time. These PLCP queries enable the efficient long LEM query. Long LEMs may provide useful similarity information between a pattern and a text that MEMs may ignore. This information is particularly useful in pangenome and biobank scale haplotype panel contexts.

Cite as

Ahsan Sanaullah, Degui Zhi, and Shaojie Zhang. An Efficient Data Structure and Algorithm for Long-Match Query in Run-Length Compressed BWT. In 25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 344, pp. 17:1-17:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{sanaullah_et_al:LIPIcs.WABI.2025.17,
  author =	{Sanaullah, Ahsan and Zhi, Degui and Zhang, Shaojie},
  title =	{{An Efficient Data Structure and Algorithm for Long-Match Query in Run-Length Compressed BWT}},
  booktitle =	{25th International Conference on Algorithms for Bioinformatics (WABI 2025)},
  pages =	{17:1--17:25},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-386-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{344},
  editor =	{Brejov\'{a}, Bro\v{n}a and Patro, Rob},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.17},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239433},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2025.17},
  annote =	{Keywords: BWT, LEM, Long LEM, MEM, Run Length Compressed BWT, Move Data Structure, Pangenome}
}

Document

Research

DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.7

Conditional Lower Bounds for String Matching in Labelled Graphs

Authors: Massimo Equi

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

Abstract

The problem of String Matching in Labelled Graphs (SMLG) is one possible generalization of the classic problem of finding a string inside another of greater length. In its most general form, SMLG asks to find a match for a string into a graph, which can be directed or undirected. As for string matching, many different variations are possible. For example, the match could be exact or approximate, and the match could lie on a path or a walk. Some of these variations easily fall into the NP-hard realm, while other variants are solvable in polynomial time. For the latter ones, fine-grained complexity has been a game changer in proving quadratic conditional lower bounds, allowing to finally close the gap with those upper bounds that remained unmatched for almost two decades. If the match is allowed to be approximate, SMLG enjoys the same conditional quadratic lower bounds shown for example for edit distance (Backurs and Indyk, STOC '15). The case that really requires ad hoc conditional lower bounds is the one of finding an exact match that lies on a walk. In this work, we focus on explaining various conditional lower bounds for this version of SMLG, with the goal of giving an overall perspective that could help understand which aspects of the problem make it quadratic. We will introduce the reader to the field of fine-grained complexity and show how it can successfully provide the exact type of lower bounds needed for polynomial problems such as SMLG.

Cite as

Massimo Equi. Conditional Lower Bounds for String Matching in Labelled Graphs. 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. 7:1-7:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{equi:OASIcs.Grossi.7,
  author =	{Equi, Massimo},
  title =	{{Conditional Lower Bounds for String Matching in Labelled Graphs}},
  booktitle =	{From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{7:1--7:13},
  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.7},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238063},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: conditional lower bounds, strong exponential time hypothesis, fine-grained complexity, string matching, graphs}
}

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/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.12

Wheeler Graphs and Wheeler Languages

Authors: Nicola Cotumaccio, Giovanna D'Agostino, Daniel Gibney, Alberto Policriti, Nicola Prezza, and Sharma V. Thankachan

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

Abstract

Suffix sorting stands at the core of the most efficient solutions for indexed pattern matching: the suffix tree, the suffix array, compressed indexes based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and so on. In [Gagie, Manzini, Sirén, TCS 2017] this concept was extended to labeled graphs, obtaining the rich class of Wheeler graphs. This work opened a very fruitful line of research, ultimately generating results able to bridge the fields of compressed data structures, graph theory, and regular language theory. In a Wheeler graph, nodes are sorted according to the alphabetic order of their incoming labels, propagating this order through pairs of equally-labeled edges. This apparently-simple definition makes it possible to solve on Wheeler graphs problems (including, but not limited to: compression, subpath queries, NFA equivalence, determinization, minimization) that on general labeled graphs are extremely hard to solve, and induces a rich structure in the class of regular languages (Wheeler languages) recognized by automata whose state transition is a Wheeler graph. The goal of this survey is to provide a summary of (and intuitions behind) the results on Wheeler graphs that appeared in the literature since their introduction, in addition to a discussion of interesting problems that are still open in the field.

Cite as

Nicola Cotumaccio, Giovanna D'Agostino, Daniel Gibney, Alberto Policriti, Nicola Prezza, and Sharma V. Thankachan. Wheeler Graphs and Wheeler Languages. In The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 131, pp. 12:1-12:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{cotumaccio_et_al:OASIcs.Manzini.12,
  author =	{Cotumaccio, Nicola and D'Agostino, Giovanna and Gibney, Daniel and Policriti, Alberto and Prezza, Nicola and Thankachan, Sharma V.},
  title =	{{Wheeler Graphs and Wheeler Languages}},
  booktitle =	{The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{12:1--12:28},
  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.12},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239205},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.12},
  annote =	{Keywords: Wheeler languages, Wheeler graphs, pattern matching, indexing, compressed data structures}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.13

Graph Indexing Beyond Wheeler Graphs

Authors: Jarno N. Alanko, Elena Biagi, Massimo Equi, Veli Mäkinen, Simon J. Puglisi, Nicola Rizzo, Kunihiko Sadakane, and Jouni Sirén

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

Abstract

After the discovery of the FM index, which linked the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) to pattern matching on strings, several contemporaneous strands of research began on indexing more complex structures with the BWT, such as tries, finite languages, de Bruijn graphs, and aligned sequences. These directions can now be viewed as culminating in the theory of Wheeler Graphs, but sometimes they go beyond. This chapter reviews the significant body of "proto Wheeler Graph" indexes, many of which exploit characteristics of their specific case to outperform Wheeler graphs, especially in practice.

Cite as

Jarno N. Alanko, Elena Biagi, Massimo Equi, Veli Mäkinen, Simon J. Puglisi, Nicola Rizzo, Kunihiko Sadakane, and Jouni Sirén. Graph Indexing Beyond Wheeler Graphs. In The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 131, pp. 13:1-13:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{alanko_et_al:OASIcs.Manzini.13,
  author =	{Alanko, Jarno N. and Biagi, Elena and Equi, Massimo and M\"{a}kinen, Veli and Puglisi, Simon J. and Rizzo, Nicola and Sadakane, Kunihiko and Sir\'{e}n, Jouni},
  title =	{{Graph Indexing Beyond Wheeler Graphs}},
  booktitle =	{The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{13:1--13:29},
  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.13},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239215},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.13},
  annote =	{Keywords: indexing, compression, compressed data structures, string algorithms, pattern matching}
}

Document

Track A: Algorithms, Complexity and Games

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.88

Repetition Aware Text Indexing for Matching Patterns with Wildcards

Authors: Daniel Gibney, Jackson Huffstutler, Mano Prakash Parthasarathi, and Sharma V. Thankachan

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 334, 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)

Abstract

We study the problem of indexing a text T[1..n] to support pattern matching with wildcards. The input of a query is a pattern P[1..m] containing h ∈ [0, k] wildcard (a.k.a. don't care) characters and the output is the set of occurrences of P in T (i.e., starting positions of substrings of T that matches P), where k = o(log n) is fixed at index construction. A classic solution by Cole et al. [STOC 2004] provides an index with space complexity O(n ⋅ (clog n)^k/k!)) and query time O(m+2^h log log n+occ), where c > 1 is a constant, and occ denotes the number of occurrences of P in T. We introduce a new data structure that significantly reduces space usage for highly repetitive texts while maintaining efficient query processing. Its space (in words) and query time are as follows: O(δ log (n/δ)⋅ c^k (1+(log^k (δ log n))/k!)) and O((m+2^h +occ)log n)) The parameter δ, known as substring complexity, is a recently introduced measure of repetitiveness that serves as a unifying and lower-bounding metric for several popular measures, including the number of phrases in the LZ77 factorization (denoted by z) and the number of runs in the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (denoted by r). Moreover, O(δ log (n/δ)) represents the optimal space required to encode the data in terms of n and δ, helping us see how close our space is to the minimum required. In another trade-off, we match the query time of Cole et al.’s index using O(n+δ log (n/δ) ⋅ (clogδ)^{k+ε}/k!) space, where ε > 0 is an arbitrarily small constant. We also demonstrate how these techniques can be applied to a more general indexing problem, where the query pattern includes k-gaps (a gap can be interpreted as a contiguous sequence of wildcard characters).

Cite as

Daniel Gibney, Jackson Huffstutler, Mano Prakash Parthasarathi, and Sharma V. Thankachan. Repetition Aware Text Indexing for Matching Patterns with Wildcards. In 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 334, pp. 88:1-88:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{gibney_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.88,
  author =	{Gibney, Daniel and Huffstutler, Jackson and Parthasarathi, Mano Prakash and Thankachan, Sharma V.},
  title =	{{Repetition Aware Text Indexing for Matching Patterns with Wildcards}},
  booktitle =	{52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)},
  pages =	{88:1--88:20},
  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.2025.88},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-234656},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.88},
  annote =	{Keywords: Pattern Matching, Text Indexing, Wildcard Matching}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.15

Encoding Co-Lex Orders of Finite-State Automata in Linear Space

Authors: Ruben Becker, Nicola Cotumaccio, Sung-Hwan Kim, Nicola Prezza, and Carlo Tosoni

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 331, 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)

Abstract

The Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) is a string transformation that enhances string indexing and compressibility. Cotumaccio and Prezza [SODA '21] extended this transformation to nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) through co-lexicographic partial orders, i.e., by sorting the states of an NFA according to the co-lexicographic order of the strings reaching them. As the BWT of an NFA shares many properties with its original string variant, the transformation can be used to implement indices for locating specific patterns on the NFA itself. The efficiency of the resulting index is influenced by the width of the partial order on the states: the smaller the width, the faster the index. The most efficient index for arbitrary NFAs currently known in the literature is based on the coarsest forward-stable co-lex (CFS) order of Becker et al. [SPIRE '24]. In this paper, we prove that this CFS order can be encoded within linear space in the number of states in the automaton. The importance of this result stems from the fact that encoding such an order in linear space represents a big first step in the direction of building the index based on this order in near-linear time - the biggest open research question in this context. The currently most efficient known algorithm for this task run in quadratic time in the number of transitions in the NFA and are thus infeasible to run on very large graphs (e.g., pangenome graphs). At this point, a near-linear time algorithm is solely known for the simpler case of deterministic automata [Becker et al., ESA '23] and, in fact, this algorithmic result was enabled by a linear space encoding for deterministic automata [Kim et al., CPM '23].

Cite as

Ruben Becker, Nicola Cotumaccio, Sung-Hwan Kim, Nicola Prezza, and Carlo Tosoni. Encoding Co-Lex Orders of Finite-State Automata in Linear Space. In 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 331, pp. 15:1-15:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{becker_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2025.15,
  author =	{Becker, Ruben and Cotumaccio, Nicola and Kim, Sung-Hwan and Prezza, Nicola and Tosoni, Carlo},
  title =	{{Encoding Co-Lex Orders of Finite-State Automata in Linear Space}},
  booktitle =	{36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)},
  pages =	{15:1--15:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-369-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{331},
  editor =	{Bonizzoni, Paola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.15},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231094},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler Transform, Co-Lexicographic Orders, Nondeterministic Finite Automata, Graph Walks}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.24

Sorted Consecutive Occurrence Queries in Substrings

Authors: Waseem Akram and Takuya Mieno

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 331, 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)

Abstract

The string indexing problem is a fundamental computational problem with numerous applications, including information retrieval and bioinformatics. It aims to efficiently solve the pattern matching problem: given a text T of length n for preprocessing and a pattern P of length m as a query, the goal is to report all occurrences of P as substrings of T. Navarro and Thankachan [CPM 2015, Theor. Comput. Sci. 2016] introduced a variant of this problem called the gap-bounded consecutive occurrence query, which reports pairs of consecutive occurrences of P in T such that their gaps (i.e., the distances between them) lie within a query-specified range [g₁, g₂]. Recently, Bille et al. [FSTTCS 2020, Theor. Comput. Sci. 2022] proposed the top-k close consecutive occurrence query, which reports the k closest consecutive occurrences of P in T, sorted in non-decreasing order of distance. Both problems are optimally solved in query time with O(n log n)-space data structures. In this paper, we generalize these problems to the range query model, which focuses only on occurrences of P in a specified substring T[a.. b] of T. Our contributions are as follows: - We propose an O(n log² n)-space data structure that answers the range top-k consecutive occurrence query in O(|P| + log log n + k) time. - We propose an O(n log^{2+ε} n)-space data structure that answers the range gap-bounded consecutive occurrence query in O(|P| + log log n + output) time, where ε is a positive constant and output denotes the number of outputs. Additionally, as by-products, we present algorithms for geometric problems involving weighted horizontal segments in a 2D plane, which are of independent interest.

Cite as

Waseem Akram and Takuya Mieno. Sorted Consecutive Occurrence Queries in Substrings. In 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 331, pp. 24:1-24:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{akram_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2025.24,
  author =	{Akram, Waseem and Mieno, Takuya},
  title =	{{Sorted Consecutive Occurrence Queries in Substrings}},
  booktitle =	{36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)},
  pages =	{24:1--24:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-369-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{331},
  editor =	{Bonizzoni, Paola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.24},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231187},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.24},
  annote =	{Keywords: string algorithm, consecutive occurrences, suffix tree}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20

Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions

Authors: Hideo Bannai, Philip Bille, Inge Li Gørtz, Gad M. Landau, Gonzalo Navarro, Nicola Prezza, Teresa Anna Steiner, and Simon Rumle Tarnow

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 331, 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)

Abstract

We study the problem of indexing a text T[1..n] ∈ Σⁿ so that, later, given a query regular expression pattern R of size m = |R|, we can report all the occ substrings T[i..j] of T matching R. The problem is known to be hard for arbitrary patterns R, so in this paper, we consider the following two types of patterns. (1) Character-class Kleene-star patterns of the form P₁ D^* P₂, where P₁ and P₂ are strings and D = {c₁, …, c_k} ⊂ Σ is a character-class (shorthand for the regular expression (c₁ | c₂ | ⋯ | c_k)) and (2) String Kleene-star patterns of the form P₁ P^* P₂ where P, P₁ and P₂ are strings. In case (1), we describe an index of O(nlog^{1+ε}n) space (for any constant ε > 0) solving queries in time O(m + log n/log log n + occ) on constant-sized alphabets. We also describe a general solution for any alphabet size. This result is conditioned on the existence of an anchor: a character of P₁P₂ that does not belong to D. We justify this assumption by proving that no efficient indexing solution can exist if an anchor is not present unless the Set Disjointness Conjecture fails. In case (2), we describe an index of size O(n) answering queries in time O(m + (occ+1)log^{ε}n) on any alphabet size.

Cite as

Hideo Bannai, Philip Bille, Inge Li Gørtz, Gad M. Landau, Gonzalo Navarro, Nicola Prezza, Teresa Anna Steiner, and Simon Rumle Tarnow. Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions. In 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 331, pp. 20:1-20:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{bannai_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20,
  author =	{Bannai, Hideo and Bille, Philip and G{\o}rtz, Inge Li and Landau, Gad M. and Navarro, Gonzalo and Prezza, Nicola and Steiner, Teresa Anna and Tarnow, Simon Rumle},
  title =	{{Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions}},
  booktitle =	{36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)},
  pages =	{20:1--20:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-369-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{331},
  editor =	{Bonizzoni, Paola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231143},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20},
  annote =	{Keywords: Text indexing, regular expressions, data structures}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.38

Two-Dimensional Longest Common Extension Queries in Compact Space

Authors: Arnab Ganguly, Daniel Gibney, Rahul Shah, and Sharma V. Thankachan

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 327, 42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025)

Abstract

For a length n text over an alphabet of size σ, we can encode the suffix tree data structure in 𝒪(nlog σ) bits of space. It supports suffix array (SA), inverse suffix array (ISA), and longest common extension (LCE) queries in 𝒪(log^ε_σ n) time, which enables efficient pattern matching; here ε > 0 is an arbitrarily small constant. Further improvements are possible for LCE queries, where 𝒪(1) time queries can be achieved using an index of space 𝒪(nlog σ) bits. However, compactly indexing a two-dimensional text (i.e., an n× n matrix) has been a major open problem. We show progress in this direction by first presenting an 𝒪(n²log σ)-bit structure supporting LCE queries in near 𝒪((log_σ n)^{2/3}) time. We then present an 𝒪(n²log σ + n²log log n)-bit structure supporting ISA queries in near 𝒪(log n ⋅ (log_σ n)^{2/3}) time. Within a similar space, achieving SA queries in poly-logarithmic (even strongly sub-linear) time is a significant challenge. However, our 𝒪(n²log σ + n²log log n)-bit structure can support SA queries in 𝒪(n²/(σ log n)^c) time, where c is an arbitrarily large constant, which enables pattern matching in time faster than what is possible without preprocessing. We then design a repetition-aware data structure. The δ_2D compressibility measure for two-dimensional texts was recently introduced by Carfagna and Manzini [SPIRE 2023]. The measure ranges from 1 to n², with smaller δ_2D indicating a highly compressible two-dimensional text. The current data structure utilizing δ_2D allows only element access. We obtain the first structure based on δ_2D for LCE queries. It takes 𝒪^{~}(n^{5/3} + n^{8/5}δ_2D^{1/5}) space and answers queries in 𝒪(log n) time.

Cite as

Arnab Ganguly, Daniel Gibney, Rahul Shah, and Sharma V. Thankachan. Two-Dimensional Longest Common Extension Queries in Compact Space. In 42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 327, pp. 38:1-38:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{ganguly_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2025.38,
  author =	{Ganguly, Arnab and Gibney, Daniel and Shah, Rahul and Thankachan, Sharma V.},
  title =	{{Two-Dimensional Longest Common Extension Queries in Compact Space}},
  booktitle =	{42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025)},
  pages =	{38:1--38:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-365-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{327},
  editor =	{Beyersdorff, Olaf and Pilipczuk, Micha{\l} and Pimentel, Elaine and Thắng, Nguy\~{ê}n Kim},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.38},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-228649},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.38},
  annote =	{Keywords: String matching, text indexing, two-dimensional text}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2024.16

Longest Common Substring with Gaps and Related Problems

Authors: Aranya Banerjee, Daniel Gibney, and Sharma V. Thankachan

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 308, 32nd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2024)

Abstract

The longest common substring (also known as longest common factor) and longest common subsequence problems are two well-studied classical string problems. The former is solvable in optimal 𝒪(n) time for two strings of length m and n with m ≤ n, and the latter is solvable in 𝒪(nm) time, which is conditionally optimal under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. In this work, we study the problem of longest common factor with gaps, that is, finding a set of at most k matching substrings obeying precedence conditions with maximum total length. For k = 1, this is equivalent to the longest common factor problem, and for k = m, this is equivalent to the longest common subsequence problem. Our work demonstrates that, for constant k, this problem can be solved in strongly subquadratic time, i.e., nm^{1 - Θ(1)}. Motivated by co-linear chaining applications in Computational Biology, we further demonstrate that the longest common factor with gaps results can be extended to the case where the matches are restricted to maximal exact matches (MEMs). To further demonstrate the applicability of our techniques, we show that a similar approach can be used for a restricted version of the episode matching problem where one seeks an ordered set of at most k matches whose concatenation equals a query pattern P and the length of the substring of T containing the matches is minimized. These solutions all run in strongly subquadratic time for constant k.

Cite as

Aranya Banerjee, Daniel Gibney, and Sharma V. Thankachan. Longest Common Substring with Gaps and Related Problems. In 32nd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 308, pp. 16:1-16:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{banerjee_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2024.16,
  author =	{Banerjee, Aranya and Gibney, Daniel and Thankachan, Sharma V.},
  title =	{{Longest Common Substring with Gaps and Related Problems}},
  booktitle =	{32nd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2024)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-338-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{308},
  editor =	{Chan, Timothy and Fischer, Johannes and Iacono, John and Herman, Grzegorz},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2024.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-210877},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2024.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Pattern Matching, Longest Common Subsequence, Episode Matching}
}

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