A Unified Algorithm for Accelerating Edit-Distance Computation via Text-Compression

The edit distance problem is a classical fundamental problem in computer science in general, and in combinatorial pattern matching in particular. The standard dynamic-programming solution for this problem computes the edit-distance between a pair of strings of total length O(N) in O(N2 ) time. To this date, this quadratic upperbound has never been substantially improved for general strings. However, there are known techniques for breaking this bound in case the strings are known to compress well under a particular compression scheme. The basic idea is to first compress the strings, and then to compute the edit distance between the compressed strings. As it turns out, practically all known o(N2 ) edit-distance algorithms work, in some sense, under the same paradigm described above. It is therefore natural to ask whether there is a single edit-distance algorithm that works for strings which are compressed under any compression scheme. A rephrasing of this question is to ask whether a si...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: STACS
• Authors: Danny Hermelin, Gad M. Landau, Shir Landau, Oren Weimann
• Keywords: Compression Schemes, Edit Distance, Edit Distance Problem, STACS 2009, Theoretical Computer Science