The String-to-Dictionary Matching Problem

The String-to-Dictionary Matching Problem is defined, in which a string is searched for in all the possible concatenations of the elements of a given dictionary, with applications to compressed matching in variable to fixed length encodings, such as Tunstall's. An algorithm based on suffix trees is suggested and experiments on natural language text are presented suggesting that compressed search might use less comparisons for long enough patterns, in spite of a potentially large number of encodings.