Breaking a Barrier in Constructing Compact Indexes for Parameterized Pattern Matching

A parameterized string (p-string) is a string over an alphabet $(Σ_{s} \cup Σ_{p})$, where $Σ_{s}$ and $Σ_{p}$ are disjoint alphabets for static symbols (s-symbols) and for parameter symbols (p-symbols), respectively. Two p-strings $x$ and $y$ are said to parameterized match (p-match) if and only if $x$ can be transformed into $y$ by applying a bijection on $Σ_{p}$ to every occurrence of p-symbols in $x$. The indexing problem for p-matching is to preprocess a p-string $T$ of length $n$ so that we can efficiently find the occurrences of substrings of $T$ that p-match with a given pattern. Extending the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) based index for exact string pattern matching, Ganguly et al. [SODA 2017] proposed the first compact index (named pBWT) for p-matching, and posed an open problem on how to construct it in compact space, i.e., in $O(n \lg |Σ_{s} \cup Σ_{p}|)$ bits of space. Hashimoto et al. [SPIRE 2022] partially solved this problem by showing how to construct some components of pBWTs for $T$ in $O(n \frac{|Σ_{p}| \lg n}{\lg \lg n})$ time in an online manner while reading the symbols of $T$ from right to left. In this paper, we improve the time complexity to $O(n \frac{\lg |Σ_{p}| \lg n}{\lg \lg n})$. We remark that removing the multiplicative factor of $|Σ_{p}|$ from the complexity is of great interest because it has not been achieved for over a decade in the construction of related data structures like parameterized suffix arrays even in the offline setting. We also show that our data structure can support backward search, a core procedure of BWT-based indexes, at any stage of the online construction, making it the first compact index for p-matching that can be constructed in compact space and even in an online manner.