Off-line compression by greedy textual substitution

Greedy off-line textual substitution refers to the following approach to compression or structural inference. Given a long textstring x, a substring w is identifies such that replacing all instances of w in x except one by a suitable pair of pointers yields the highest possible contraction of x; the process is then repeated on the contracted textstring until substrings capable of producing contractions can no longer be found. This paper examines computational issues arising in the implementation of this paradigm and describes some applications and experiments.