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Dominik Kempa

Publications and source records attributed to Dominik Kempa.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2019

At the Roots of Dictionary Compression: String Attractors

A well-known fact in the field of lossless text compression is that high-order entropy is a weak model when the input contains long repetitions. Motivated by this, decades of research have generated myriads of so-called dictionary compressors: algorithms able to reduce the text's size by exploiting its repetitiveness. Lempel-Ziv 77 is one of the most successful and well-known tools of this kind, followed by straight-line programs, run-length Burrows-Wheeler transform, macro schemes, collage systems, and the compact directed acyclic word graph. In this paper, we show that these techniques are different solutions to the same, elegant, combinatorial problem: to find a small set of positions capturing all text's substrings. We call such a set a string attractor. We first show reductions between dictionary compressors and string attractors. This gives the approximation ratios of dictionary compressors with respect to the smallest string attractor and uncovers new relations between the output sizes of different compressors. We show that the $k$-attractor problem: deciding whether a text has a size-$t$ set of positions capturing substrings of length at most $k$, is NP-complete for $k\geq 3$. We provide several approximation techniques for the smallest $k$-attractor, show that the problem is APX-complete for constant $k$, and give strong inapproximability results. To conclude, we provide matching lower and upper bounds for the random access problem on string attractors. The upper bound is proved by showing a data structure supporting queries in optimal time. Our data structure is universal: by our reductions to string attractors, it supports random access on any dictionary-compression scheme. In particular, it matches the lower bound also on LZ77, straight-line programs, collage systems, and macro schemes, and therefore closes (at once) the random access problem for all these compressors.

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arXiv2019

Optimal Construction of Compressed Indexes for Highly Repetitive Texts

We propose algorithms that, given the input string of length $n$ over integer alphabet of size $σ$, construct the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), the permuted longest-common-prefix (PLCP) array, and the LZ77 parsing in $O(n/\log_σn+r\,{\rm polylog}\,n)$ time and working space, where $r$ is the number of runs in the BWT of the input. These are the essential components of many compressed indexes such as compressed suffix tree, FM-index, and grammar and LZ77-based indexes, but also find numerous applications in sequence analysis and data compression. The value of $r$ is a common measure of repetitiveness that is significantly smaller than $n$ if the string is highly repetitive. Since just accessing every symbol of the string requires $Ω(n/\log_σn)$ time, the presented algorithms are time and space optimal for inputs satisfying the assumption $n/r\inΩ({\rm polylog}\,n)$ on the repetitiveness. For such inputs our result improves upon the currently fastest general algorithms of Belazzougui (STOC 2014) and Munro et al. (SODA 2017) which run in $O(n)$ time and use $O(n/\log_σ n)$ working space. We also show how to use our techniques to obtain optimal solutions on highly repetitive data for other fundamental string processing problems such as: Lyndon factorization, construction of run-length compressed suffix arrays, and some classical "textbook" problems such as computing the longest substring occurring at least some fixed number of times.

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arXiv2019

String Synchronizing Sets: Sublinear-Time BWT Construction and Optimal LCE Data Structure

Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) is an invertible text transformation that, given a text $T$ of length $n$, permutes its symbols according to the lexicographic order of suffixes of $T$. BWT is one of the most heavily studied algorithms in data compression with numerous applications in indexing, sequence analysis, and bioinformatics. Its construction is a bottleneck in many scenarios, and settling the complexity of this task is one of the most important unsolved problems in sequence analysis that has remained open for 25 years. Given a binary string of length $n$, occupying $O(n/\log n)$ machine words, the BWT construction algorithm due to Hon et al. (SIAM J. Comput., 2009) runs in $O(n)$ time and $O(n/\log n)$ space. Recent advancements (Belazzougui, STOC 2014, and Munro et al., SODA 2017) focus on removing the alphabet-size dependency in the time complexity, but they still require $Ω(n)$ time. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm that breaks the $O(n)$-time barrier for BWT construction. Given a binary string of length $n$, our procedure builds the Burrows-Wheeler transform in $O(n/\sqrt{\log n})$ time and $O(n/\log n)$ space. We complement this result with a conditional lower bound proving that any further progress in the time complexity of BWT construction would yield faster algorithms for the very well studied problem of counting inversions: it would improve the state-of-the-art $O(m\sqrt{\log m})$-time solution by Chan and Pǎtraşcu (SODA 2010). Our algorithm is based on a novel concept of string synchronizing sets, which is of independent interest. As one of the applications, we show that this technique lets us design a data structure of the optimal size $O(n/\log n)$ that answers Longest Common Extension queries (LCE queries) in $O(1)$ time and, furthermore, can be deterministically constructed in the optimal $O(n/\log n)$ time.

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arXiv2018

String Attractors: Verification and Optimization

String attractors [STOC 2018] are combinatorial objects recently introduced to unify all known dictionary compression techniques in a single theory. A set $Γ\subseteq [1..n]$ is a $k$-attractor for a string $S\in[1..σ]^n$ if and only if every distinct substring of $S$ of length at most $k$ has an occurrence straddling at least one of the positions in $Γ$. Finding the smallest $k$-attractor is NP-hard for $k\geq3$, but polylogarithmic approximations can be found using reductions from dictionary compressors. It is easy to reduce the $k$-attractor problem to a set-cover instance where string's positions are interpreted as sets of substrings. The main result of this paper is a much more powerful reduction based on the truncated suffix tree. Our new characterization of the problem leads to more efficient algorithms for string attractors: we show how to check the validity and minimality of a $k$-attractor in near-optimal time and how to quickly compute exact and approximate solutions. For example, we prove that a minimum $3$-attractor can be found in optimal $O(n)$ time when $σ\in O(\sqrt[3+ε]{\log n})$ for any constant $ε>0$, and $2.45$-approximation can be computed in $O(n)$ time on general alphabets. To conclude, we introduce and study the complexity of the closely-related sharp-$k$-attractor problem: to find the smallest set of positions capturing all distinct substrings of length exactly $k$. We show that the problem is in P for $k=1,2$ and is NP-complete for constant $k\geq 3$.

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arXiv2017

LZ-End Parsing in Compressed Space

We present an algorithm that constructs the LZ-End parsing (a variation of LZ77) of a given string of length $n$ in $O(n\log\ell)$ expected time and $O(z + \ell)$ space, where $z$ is the number of phrases in the parsing and $\ell$ is the length of the longest phrase. As an option, we can fix $\ell$ (e.g., to the size of RAM) thus obtaining a reasonable LZ-End approximation with the same functionality and the length of phrases restricted by $\ell$. This modified algorithm constructs the parsing in streaming fashion in one left to right pass on the input string w.h.p. and performs one right to left pass to verify the correctness of the result. Experimentally comparing this version to other LZ77-based analogs, we show that it is of practical interest.

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arXiv2016

On the Size of Lempel-Ziv and Lyndon Factorizations

Lyndon factorization and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) factorization are both important tools for analysing the structure and complexity of strings, but their combinatorial structure is very different. In this paper, we establish the first direct connection between the two by showing that while the Lyndon factorization can be bigger than the non-overlapping LZ factorization (which we demonstrate by describing a new, non-trivial family of strings) it is never more than twice the size.

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arXiv2016

Lempel-Ziv Decoding in External Memory

Simple and fast decoding is one of the main advantages of LZ77-type text encoding used in many popular file compressors such as gzip and 7zip. With the recent introduction of external memory algorithms for Lempel-Ziv factorization there is a need for external memory LZ77 decoding but the standard algorithm makes random accesses to the text and cannot be trivially modified for external memory computation. We describe the first external memory algorithms for LZ77 decoding, prove that their I/O complexity is optimal, and demonstrate that they are very fast in practice, only about three times slower than in-memory decoding (when reading input and writing output is included in the time).

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arXiv2014

A Subquadratic Algorithm for Minimum Palindromic Factorization

We give an $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$-time, $\mathcal{O}(n)$-space algorithm for factoring a string into the minimum number of palindromic substrings. That is, given a string $S [1..n]$, in $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ time our algorithm returns the minimum number of palindromes $S_1,\ldots, S_\ell$ such that $S = S_1 \cdots S_\ell$. We also show that the time complexity is $\mathcal{O}(n)$ on average and $Ω(n\log n)$ in the worst case. The last result is based on a characterization of the palindromic structure of Zimin words.

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arXiv2013

Lempel-Ziv Parsing in External Memory

For decades, computing the LZ factorization (or LZ77 parsing) of a string has been a requisite and computationally intensive step in many diverse applications, including text indexing and data compression. Many algorithms for LZ77 parsing have been discovered over the years; however, despite the increasing need to apply LZ77 to massive data sets, no algorithm to date scales to inputs that exceed the size of internal memory. In this paper we describe the first algorithm for computing the LZ77 parsing in external memory. Our algorithm is fast in practice and will allow the next generation of text indexes to be realised for massive strings and string collections.

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arXiv2013

Lightweight Lempel-Ziv Parsing

We introduce a new approach to LZ77 factorization that uses O(n/d) words of working space and O(dn) time for any d >= 1 (for polylogarithmic alphabet sizes). We also describe carefully engineered implementations of alternative approaches to lightweight LZ77 factorization. Extensive experiments show that the new algorithm is superior in most cases, particularly at the lowest memory levels and for highly repetitive data. As a part of the algorithm, we describe new methods for computing matching statistics which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2012

Linear Time Lempel-Ziv Factorization: Simple, Fast, Small

Computing the LZ factorization (or LZ77 parsing) of a string is a computational bottleneck in many diverse applications, including data compression, text indexing, and pattern discovery. We describe new linear time LZ factorization algorithms, some of which require only 2n log n + O(log n) bits of working space to factorize a string of length n. These are the most space efficient linear time algorithms to date, using n log n bits less space than any previous linear time algorithm. The algorithms are also practical, simple to implement, and very fast in practice.

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