Cross-document pattern matching

Abstract

We study a new variant of the pattern matching problem called cross-document pattern matching, which is the problem of indexing a collection of documents to support an efficient search for a pattern in a selected document, where the pattern itself is a substring of another document. Several variants of this problem are considered, and efficient linear space solutions are proposed with query time bounds that either do not depend at all on the pattern size or depend on it in a very limited way (doubly logarithmic). As a side result, we propose an improved solution to the weighted ancestor problem.