Generalized Straight-Line Programs
Gonzalo Navarro, Francisco Olivares, and Cristian Urbina
It was recently proved that any Straight-Line Program (SLP) generating a given
string can be transformed in linear time into an equivalent balanced SLP of
the same asymptotic size. We generalize this proof to a general class of
grammars we call Generalized SLPs (GSLPs), which allow rules of the form
A --> x where x is any Turing-complete representation (of size
|x|) of a sequence of symbols (potentially much longer than |x|). We
then specialize GSLPs to so-called Iterated SLPs (ISLPs), which allow rules of
the form A --> Prod_{i=k_1}^{k_2} B_1^{i^{c_1}} ... B_t^{i^{c_t}}
of size O(t). We prove that ISLPs break, for some text families, the
measure delta based on substring complexity, a lower bound for most
measures and compressors exploiting repetitiveness. Further, ISLPs can extract
any substring of length lambda, from the represented text T[1..n],
in time O(lambda + log^2 n log log n). This is the first compressed
representation for repetitive texts breaking delta while, at the same
time, supporting direct access to arbitrary text symbols in polylogarithmic
time. We also show how to compute some substring queries, like range minima
and next/previous smaller value, in time O(log^2 n log log n). Finally,
we further specialize the grammars to Run-Length SLPs (RLSLPs), which restrict
the rules allowed by ISLPs to the form A --> B^t. Apart from
inheriting all the previous results with the term log^2 n log log n
reduced to the near-optimal log n, we show that RLSLPs can exploit
balancedness to efficiently compute a wide class of substring queries we call
``composable''---i.e., f(X . Y) can be obtained from f(X) and
f(Y). As an example, we show how to compute Karp-Rabin fingerprints of
texts substrings in O(log n) time. While the results on RLSLPs were already known, ours are much simpler and require little precomputation time and extra data associated with the grammar.