Subsequence Covers of Words

Abstract

We introduce subsequence covers (s-covers, in short), a new type of covers of a word. A word C is an s-cover of a word S if the occurrences of C in S as subsequences cover all the positions in S. The s-covers seem to be computationally much harder than standard covers of words (cf. Apostolico et al., Inf. Process. Lett. 1991), but, on the other hand, much easier than the related shuffle powers (Warmuth and Haussler, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 1984). We give a linear-time algorithm for testing if a candidate word C is an scover of a word S over a polynomially-bounded integer alphabet. We also give an algorithm for finding a shortest s-cover of a word S, which in the case of a constant-sized alphabet, also runs in linear time. Furthermore, we complement our algorithmic results with a lower and an upper bound on the length of a longest word without non-trivial s-covers, which are both exponential in the size of the alphabet.