Efficient text fingerprinting via Parikh mapping

We consider the problem of fingerprinting text by sets of symbols. Specifically, if S is a string, of length n, over a finite, ordered alphabet Σ , and S′ is a substring of S, then the fingerprint of S′ is the subset φ of Σ of precisely the symbols appearing in S′. In this paper we show efficient methods of answering various queries on fingerprint statistics. Our preprocessing is done in time O(n|Σ | logn log |Σ |) and enables answering the following queries: (1) Given an integer k, compute the number of distinct fingerprints of size k in time O(1). (2) Given a set φ ⊆ Σ , compute the total number of distinct occurrences in S of substrings with fingerprint φ in time O(|Σ | logn).  2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.