On-Line Construction of Position Heaps

Abstract

We propose a simple linear-time on-line algorithm for constructing a position heap for a string [EMOW11]. Our definition of position heap differs slightly from the one proposed in [EMOW11] in that it considers the suffixes ordered in the descending order of length. Our construction is based on classic suffix pointers and resembles the Ukkonen’s algorithm for suffix trees [Ukk95]. Using suffix pointers, the position heap can be extended into the augmented position heap that allows for a linear-time string matching algorithm [EMOW11].