Topics in combinatorial pattern matching

This dissertation studies problems in the general theme of combinatorial pattern matching. More specifically, we study the following topics: Longest Common Extensions. We revisit the longest common extension (LCE) problem, that is, preprocess a string T into a compact data structure that supports fast LCE queries. An LCE query takes a pair (i, j) of indices in T and returns the length of the longest common prefix of the suffixes of T starting at positions i and j. Such queries are also commonly known as longest common prefix (LCP) queries. We study the time-space trade-offs for the problem, that is, the space used for the data structure vs. the worst-case time for answering an LCE query. Let n be the length of T . Given a parameter τ , 1 ≤ τ ≤ n, we show how to achieve either O(n/√τ) space and O(τ) query time, or O(n/τ) space and O(τ log(|LCE(i, j)|/τ)) query time, where |LCE(i, j)| denotes the length of the LCE returned by the query. These bounds provide the first smooth trade-offs for the LCE problem and almost match the previously known bounds at the extremes when τ = 1 or τ = n. We apply the result to obtain improved bounds for several applications where the LCE problem is the computational bottleneck, including approximate string matching and computing palindromes. We also present an efficient technique to reduce LCE queries on two strings to one string. Finally, we give a lower bound on the time-space product for LCE data structures in the non-uniform cell probe model showing that our second trade-off is nearly optimal. Fingerprints in Compressed Strings. The Karp-Rabin fingerprint of a string is a type of hash value that due to its strong properties has been used in many string algorithms. We show how to construct a data structure for a string S of size N compressed by a context-free grammar of size n that supports fingerprint queries. That is, given indices i and j, the answer to a query is the