On-line construction of compact directed acyclic word graphs

Many different index structures, providing efficient solutions to problems related to pattern matching, have been introduced so far. Examples of these structures are suffix trees and directed acyclic word graphs (DAWGs), which can be efficiently constructed in linear time and space. Compact directed acyclic word graphs (CDAWGs) are an index structure preserving some features of both suffix trees and DAWGs, and require less space than both of them. An algorithm which directly constructs CDAWGs in linear time and space was first introduced by Crochemore and Verin, based on McCreight's algorithm for constructing suffix trees. In this work, we present a novel on-line linear-time algorithm that builds the CDAWG for a single string as well as for a set of strings, inspired by Ukkonen's on-line algorithm for constructing suffix trees. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.