Efficiency of fast parallel pattern searching in highly compressed texts

We consider efficiency of NC-algorithms for pattern-searching in highly compressed one- and two-dimensional texts. “Highly compressed” means that the text can be exponentially large with respect to its compressed version, and “fast” means “in polylogarithmic time”. Given an uncompressed pattern P and a compressed version of a text T, the compressed matching problem is to test if P occurs in T. Two types of closely related compressed representations of 1-dimensional texts are considered: the Lempel-Ziv encodings (LZ, in short) and restricted LZ encodings (RLZ, in short). For highly compressed texts there is a small difference between them, in extreme situations both of them compress text exponentially, e.g. Fibonacci words of size N have compressed versions of size O(logN) for LZ and Restricted LZ encodings. Despite similarities we prove that LZ-compressed matching is P-complete while RLZ-compressed matching is rather trivially in NC. We show how to improve a naive straightforward NC algorithm and obtain almost optimal parallel RLZ-compressed matching applying tree-contraction techniques to directed acyclic graphs with polynomial tree-size. As a corollary we obtain an almost optimal parallel algorithm for LZW-compressed matching which is simpler than the (more general) algorithm in [11]. Highly compressed 2-dimensional texts are also considered.