On the Smallest Size of Internal Collage Systems

A Straight-Line Program (SLP) for a string $T$ is a context-free grammar in Chomsky normal form that derives $T$ only, which can be seen as a compressed form of $T$. Kida et al.\ introduced collage systems [Theor. Comput. Sci., 2003] to generalize SLPs by adding repetition rules and truncation rules. The smallest size $c(T)$ of collage systems for $T$ has gained attention to see how these generalized rules improve the compression ability of SLPs. Navarro et al. [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2021] showed that $c(T) \in O(z(T))$ and there is a string family with $c(T) \in \Omega(b(T) \log |T|)$, where $z(T)$ is the number of phrases in the Lempel-Ziv parsing of $T$ and $b(T)$ is the smallest size of bidirectional schemes for $T$. They also introduced a subclass of collage systems, called internal collage systems, and proved that its smallest size $\hat{c}(T)$ for $T$ is at least $b(T)$. While $c(T) \le \hat{c}(T)$ is obvious, it is unknown how large $\hat{c}(T)$ is compared to $c(T)$. In this paper, we prove that $\hat{c}(T) = \Theta(c(T))$ by showing that any collage system of size $m$ can be transformed into an internal collage system of size $O(m)$ in $O(m^2)$ time. Thanks to this result, we can focus on internal collage systems to study the asymptotic behavior of $c(T)$, which helps to suppress excess use of truncation rules. As a direct application, we get $b(T) = O(c(T))$, which answers an open question posed in [Navarro et al., IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2021]. We also give a MAX-SAT formulation to compute $\hat{c}(T)$ for a given $T$.