Dictionary matching in a stream

Abstract

We consider the problem of dictionary matching in a stream. Given a set of strings, known as a dictionary, and a stream of characters arriving one at a time, the task is to report each time some string in our dictionary occurs in the stream. We present a randomised algorithm which takes O(log log(k + m)) time per arriving character and uses O(k logm) words of space, where k is the number of strings in the dictionary and m is the length of the longest string in the dictionary.