Checking and producing word attractors
Data Structures and Algorithms
2025-09-11 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Abstract
The article focuses on word (or string) attractors, which are sets of positions related to the text compression efficiency of the underlying word. The article presents two combinatorial algorithms based on Suffix automata or Directed Acyclic Word Graphs. The first algorithm decides in linear time whether a set of positions on the word is an attractor of the word. The second algorithm generates an attractor for a given word in a greedy manner. Although this problem is NP-hard, the algorithm is efficient and produces very small attractors for several well-known families of words.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.08503,
title = {Checking and producing word attractors},
author = {Marie-Pierre Béal and Maxime Crochemore and Giuseppe Romana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08503},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
17 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, 2 algorithms