Counting on General Run-Length Grammars

Abstract: We introduce a data structure for counting pattern occurrences in texts compressed with any run-length context-free grammar. Our structure uses space proportional to the grammar size and counts the occurrences of a pattern of length $m$ in a text of length $n$ in time (O(m\log^{2+\epsilon} n)), for any constant (\epsilon > 0) chosen at indexing time. This is the first solution to an open problem posed by Christiansen et al.~[ACM TALG 2020] and enhances our abilities for computation over compressed data; we give an example application.