Counting Distinct (Non-)Crossing Substrings in Optimal Time

arXiv:2506.22728v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $w$ be a string of length $n$. The problem of counting factors crossing a position -- Problem 64 from the textbook ``125 Problems in Text Algorithms'' [Crochemore, Lecroq, and Rytter, 2021] -- asks to count the number $\mathcal{C}(w,k)$ (resp. $\mathcal{N}(w,k)$) of distinct substrings in $w$ that have occurrences containing (resp. not containing) a position $k$ in $w$. The solutions provided in their textbook compute $\mathcal{C}(w,k)$ and $\mathcal{N}(w,k)$ in $O(n)$ time for a single position $k$ in $w$, and thus a direct application would require $O(n^2)$ time for all positions $k = 1, \ldots, n$ in $w$. Their solution is designed for constant-size alphabets. In this paper, we present new algorithms which compute $\mathcal{C}(w,k)$ in $O(n)$ total time for general ordered alphabets, and $\mathcal{N}(w,k)$ in $O(n)$ total time for linearly sortable alphabets,for all positions $k = 1, \ldots, n$ in $w$. We further derive model-dependent optimal bounds by separating the algorithms into preprocessing and linear-time postprocessing: for $\mathcal{C}$ the preprocessing is run reporting, and for $\mathcal{N}$ it is preprocessing based on longest previous non-overlapping factors (LPnF) and longest next factors (LNF). In particular, all values $\mathcal{C}(w,k)$ can be computed in $O(n\log n)$ time over general unordered alphabets in which direct accesses to alphabet characters are restricted to equality tests, and in $O(n\log\sigma)$ time in the word RAM model, where $\sigma$ denotes the number of distinct characters occurring in $w$. For $\mathcal{N}(w,k)$, the equality-testing complexity over general unordered alphabets is $\Theta(n^2)$. We also show that our upper bounds are optimal for all of the aforementioned alphabet assumptions and computation models.