A speed-up for the commute between subword trees and DAWGs

A popular way to describe and build the DAWG or Directed Acyclic Word Graph of a string is by transformation of the corresponding subword tree. This transformation, which is not difficult to reverse, is easy to grasp and almost trivial to implement except for the assumed implication of a standard tree isomorphism algorithm. Here we point out a simple property of subword trees that makes checking tree isomorphism in this context a straightforward process, thereby simplifying the transformation significantly. Subword trees and DAWGs arise rather ubiquitously in applications of string processing, where they often play complementary roles. Efficient conversions are thus especially desirable. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.