The subsequence composition of a string

Words that appear as constrained subsequences in a text-string are considered as possible indicators of the host string structure. hence also as a possible means of sequence comparison and classification. The constraint consists of imposing a bound on the number omega of positions in the text that may intervene between any two consecutive characters of a subsequence. A subset of such to-sequences is then characterized that consists, in intuitive terms, of sequences that could not be enriched with more characters without losing some occurrence in the text. A compact spatial representation is then proposed for these representative sequences, within which a number of parameters can be defined and measured. In the final part of the paper, such parameters are empirically analyzed on a small collection of text-strings endowed with various degrees of structure. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.