Text Algorithms

Book excerpt: This much-needed book on the design of algorithms and data structures for text processing emphasizes both theoretical foundations and practical applications. It is intended to serve both as a textbook for courses on algorithm design, especially those related to text processing, and as a reference for computer science professionals. The work takes a unique approach, one that goes more deeply into its topic than other more general books. It contains both classical algorithms and recent results of research on the subject. The book is the first text to contain a collection of a wide range of text algorithms, many of them quite new and appearing here for the first time. Other algorithms, while known by reputation, have never been published in the journal literature. Two such important algorithms are those of Karp, Miller and Rosenberg, and that of Weiner. Here they are presented together for the fist time. The core of the book is the material on suffix trees and subword graphs, applications of these data structures, new approaches to time-space optimal string-matching, and text compression. Also covered are basic parallel algorithms for text problems. Applications of all these algorithms are given for problems involving data retrieval systems, treatment of natural languages, investigation of genomes, data compression software, and text processing tools. From the theoretical point of view. the book is a goldmine of paradigms for the development of efficient algorithms, providing the necessary foundation to creating practical software dealing with sequences. A crucial point in the authors' approach is the development of a methodology for presenting text algorithms so they can be fully understood. Throughout, the book emphasizes the efficiency of algorithms, holding that the essence of their usefulness depends on it. This is especially important since the algorithms described here will find application in "Big Science" areas like molecular sequence analysis where the explosive growth of data has caused problems for the current generation of software. Finally, with its development of theoretical background, the book can be considered as a mathematical foundation for the analysis and production of text processing algorithms.