Longest common Abelian factors and large alphabets

Abstract

Two strings X and Y are considered Abelian equal if the letters of X can be permuted to obtain Y (and vice versa). Recently, Alatabbi et al. (2015) considered the longest common Abelian factor problem in which we are asked to find the length of the longest Abelian-equal factor present in a given pair of strings. They provided an algorithm that uses O(σn2) time and O(σn) space, where n is the length of the pair of strings and σ is the alphabet size. In this paper we describe an algorithm that uses O(n2 log2 n log∗ n) time and O(n log2 n) space, significantly improving Alatabbi et al.’s result unless the alphabet is small. Our algorithm makes use of techniques for maintaining a dynamic set of strings under split, join, and equality testing (Melhorn et al., Algorithmica 17(2), 1997).