Course Description. Techniques for pattern matching and parsing character strings. Topics include substring searching, finite state machines, regular expressions, and context-free grammars, as well as applications in lexical analyzers, compilers, word processors, malware detectors, and search engines.

Course Notes

• Week 1:
  • Text Processing: Introduction and Applications (Lecture slides)
    1. Search engine indexing
    2. Document merging
    3. Version merging
    4. DNA sequence alignment
    5. Computer virus signature detection
    6. Plagiarism checkers
    7. Spell checkers
    8. Text-based computer games
    9. Lexical analysis
    10. Database string queries
    11. Digital forensic legal investigations
    12. Longest prefix matching for IP routing
  • Regular-expression based searching (Lecture slides)
    1. Unix file tools
    2. grep
    3. Set operations using the Unix/Linux/MacOS/Cygwin shell
  • Context-free grammars
• Week 2:
  • Finite-state machines (Lecture slides)
    1. Deterministic finite automata
    2. Nondeterministic finite automata
    3. Subset construction
  • Regular expression matching algorithms (Lecture slides)
• Week 3:
  • Comparison-based exact matching algorithms (Lecture slides)
    1. List of different algorithms
    2. Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm
    3. Boyer-Moore-Harspool algorithm (simplified Boyer-Moore)
    4. Boyer-Moore algorithm
  • Numerical exact matching algorithms (Lecture slides)
    1. Rabin-Karp algorithm
    2. Bitap (shift-or, shift-and) algorithm
• Week 4:
  • Multi-pattern exact matching algorithms (Lecture slides)
    1. Rabin-Karp algorithm (multiple pattern version)
    2. Tries
  • Searching with wildcards (Lecture slides)
    1. Bitap algorithm (with different vectors)
    2. Convolution
• Week 5:
  • Suffix trees (Lecture slides)
  • Suffix arrays (Lecture slides)
  • LCP array
• Week 6:
  • The Longest Common Subsequence problem (Lecture slides)
  • Notes on LCS
  • Hirschberg's algorithm
  • Edit distance (Lecture slides)
• Week 7:
  • Search engines (Lecture slides)
  • Web crawlers
  • Near duplicate removal
  • MinHash sketching
  • Stanford Information Retrieval book
  • Search engine indexing (Lecture slides)
  • Notes on inverted files (and a little more on LCS)
• Week 8:
  • Signature files (Lecture slides)
  • Bloom filters
  • Vector space model (Lecture slides)
  • tf-idf
  • Cosine similarity
  • Notes on signature files and vector space model
• Week 9:
  • Learning strings by adaptive aligned Mastermind queries
  • Learning strings by adaptive LCS queries
  • Learning strings by non-adaptive Mastermind queries
  • Lecture slides on Learning Strings from Queries
  • Phylogenetic trees (Lecture slides)
  • Paper on constructing phylogenetic trees sequentially
  • Paper on constructing phylogenetic trees in parallel
• Week 10:
  • Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables (Lecture slides)
  • Inter-frame video encoding
  • Cuckoo Filters (Lecture slides)