Computing Covers under Substring Consistent Equivalence Relations

Abstract: Covers are a kind of quasiperiodicity in strings. A string $C$ is a cover of another string $T$ if any position of $T$ is inside some occurrence of $C$ in $T$. The shortest and longest cover arrays of $T$ have the lengths of the shortest and longest covers of each prefix of $T$, respectively. The literature has proposed linear-time algorithms computing longest and shortest cover arrays taking border arrays as input. An equivalence relation $\approx$ over strings is called a substring consistent equivalence relation (SCER) iff $X \approx Y$ implies (1) $|X| = |Y|$ and (2) $X[i:j] \approx Y[i:j]$ for all $1 \le i \le j \le |X|$. In this paper, we generalize the notion of covers for SCERs and prove that existing algorithms to compute the shortest cover array and the longest cover array of a string $T$ under the identity relation will work for any SCERs taking the accordingly generalized border arrays.