We propose a new paradigm for string matching, namely  structural matching . In structural matching, the text and pattern contents are not important. Rather, some areas in the text and patterns are singled out, say intervals. A “match” is a text location where a specified relation between the text and pattern areas is satisfied.  In particular we define the structural matching problem of  Overlap (Parity) Matching . We seek the text locations where all overlaps of the given pattern and text intervals have even length. We show that this problem can be solved in time  O ( n  log  m ), where the text length is  n  and the pattern length is  m .  As an application of overlap matching, we show how to reduce the  String Matching with Swaps  problem to the overlap matching problem. The  String Matching with Swaps  problem is the problem of string matching in the presence of local swaps. The best known deterministic upper bound for this problem was  O ( nm  1/3  log  m  log s) for a general alphabet ∑, where s =  min ( m , ¦∑¦).  Our reduction provides a solution to the pattern matching with swaps problem in time  O ( n  log  m  log s).
['Amihood Amir', 'Richard Cole', 'Ramesh Hariharan', 'Moshe Lewenstein', 'Ely Porat']
Overlap matching