Tight bounds for the sensitivity of CDAWGs with left-end edits

Compact directed acyclic word graphs (CDAWGs) (Blumer et al. in J ACM 34(3):578–595, 1987) are a fundamental data structure on strings with applications in text pattern searching, data compression, and pattern discovery. Intuitively, the CDAWG of a string T is obtained by merging isomorphic subtrees of the suffix tree (Weiner, in: Proceedings of the 14th annual symposium on switching and automata theory, pp 1–11, 1973) of the same string T, thus CDAWGs are a compact indexing structure. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of CDAWGs when a single character edit operation (insertion, deletion, or substitution) is performed at the left-end of the input string T, namely, we are interested in the worst-case increase in the size of the CDAWG after a left-end edit operation. We prove that if \(\textsf{e}\) is the number of edges of the CDAWG for string T, then the number of new edges added to the CDAWG after a left-end edit operation on T does not exceed \(\textsf{e}\). Further, we present a matching lower bound on the sensitivity of CDAWGs for left-end insertions, and almost matching lower bounds for left-end deletions and substitutions. We then generalize our lower-bound instance for left-end insertions to leftward online construction of the CDAWG, and show that it requires \(\Omega (n^2)\) time for some string of length n.