This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2014, held in Ouro Preto, Brazil, in October 2014. The 20 full and 6 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers focus not only on fundamental algorithms in string processing and information retrieval, but address also application areas such as computational biology, Web mining and recommender systems. They are organized in topical sections on compression, indexing, genome and related topics, sequences and strings, search, as well as on mining and recommending.

The 16th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching was held on Jeju Island, Korea on June 19-22, 2005. Previous meetings were held in Paris, London, Tucson, Padova, Asilomar, Helsinki, Laguna Beach, Aarhus, Piscataway, Warwick, Montreal, Jerusalem, Fukuoka, Morelia, and Istanbul over the years 1990-2004. In response to the call for papers, CPM 2005 received a record number of 129papers.Eachsubmissionwasreviewedbyatleast threeProgramCommittee members with the assistance of external referees. Since there were many hi- quality papers, the Program Committee's task was extremely di?cult. Through an extensive discussion the Program Committee accepted 37 of the submissions tobepresentedattheconference.Theyconstituteoriginalresearchcontributions in combinatorial pattern matching and its applications. Inadditiontotheselectedpapers, CPM2005hadthreeinvitedpresentations, by Esko Ukkonen from the University of Helsinki, Ming Li from the University of Waterloo, and Naftali Tishby from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We would like to thank all Program Committee members and external r- erees for their excellent work, especially given the demanding time constraints; they gave the conference its distinctive character. We also thank all who s- mitted papers for consideration; they all contributed to the high quality of the conference. Finally, we thank the Organizing Committee members and the graduates- dents who worked hard to put in place the logistical arrangements of the c- ference. It is their dedicated contribution that made the conference possible and enjoyable

The papers contained in this volume were presented at the Tenth Annual S- posium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held July 22 { 24, 1999 at the University of Warwick, England. They were selected from 26 abstracts subm- ted in response to the call for papers. In addition, invited lectures were given by JoanFeigenbaumfromAT&TLabsResearch(Massivegraphs: algorithms, app- cations, and open problems) and David Jones from the Department of Biology, University of Warwick (Optimizing biological sequences and protein structures using simulated annealing and genetic algorithms). The symposium was preceded by a two-day summer school set up to attract and train young researchers. The lecturers of the school were Alberto Ap- tolico (Computational Theories of Surprise), Joan Feigenbaum (Algorithmics of network-generatedmassivedatasets), Leszek Gasieniecand PaulGoldberg (The complexity of gene placement), David Jones (An introduction to computational molecularbiology), Arthur Lesk (Structuralalignmentandmaximalsubstructure extraction), Cenk Sahinalp(Questformeasuringdistancebetweenstrings: exact, approximate, and probabilistic algorithms), and Jim Storer. Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expr- sions, graphs, point sets, and arrays. The goal is to derive non-trivial combi- torial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. Over recent years, a steady ?ow of high-quality research on this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a fully-?edged area of algorithmics

This volume presents the proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held at Asilomar, California, in June 1994. The 26 selected papers in this volume are organized in chapters on Alignments, Various Matchings, Combinatorial Aspects, and Bio-Informatics. Combinatorial Pattern Matching addresses issues of searching and matching of strings and more complicated patterns, as for example trees. The goal is to derive non-trivial combinatorial properties for such structures and then to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. In recent years, combinatorial pattern matching has developed into a full-fledged area of algorithmics and is expected to grow even further during the next years.

The papers contained in this volume were presented at the Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held in Padova, Italy, in June 1993. Combinatorial pattern matching addresses issues of searching and matching of strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, extended expressions, etc. The goal is to derive nontrivial combinatorial properties for such structures and then to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. In recent years, a steady flow of high-quality scientific studies of this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a full-fledged area of algorithmics. The area is expected to grow even further due to the increasing demand for speedand efficiency that comes especially from molecular biology and the Genome project, but also from other diverse areas such as information retrieval, pattern recognition, compilers, data compression, and program analysis.

This volume contains the 22 papers accepted for presentation at the Third Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching held April 29 to May 1, 1992, in Tucson, Arizona; it constitutes the first conference proceedings entirely devoted to combinatorial pattern matching (CPM). CPM deals withissues of searching and matching of strings and other more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, extended expressions, etc. in order to derive combinatorial properties for such structures. As an interdisciplinary field of growing interest, CPM is related to research in information retrieval, pattern recognition, compilers, data compression, and program analysis as well as to results, problems and methods from combinatorial mathematics and molecular biology.

String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).

The book is intended for lectures on string processes and pattern matching in Master's courses of computer science and software engineering curricula. The details of algorithms are given with correctness proofs and complexity analysis, which make them ready to implement. Algorithms are described in a C-like language. The book is also a reference for students in computational linguistics or computational biology. It presents examples of questions related to the automatic processing of natural language, to the analysis of molecular sequences, and to the management of textual databases.

The book is intended for lectures on string processes and pattern matching in Master's courses of computer science and software engineering curricula. The details of algorithms are given with correctness proofs and complexity analysis, which make them ready to implement. Algorithms are described in a C-like language. The book is also a reference for students in computational linguistics or computational biology. It presents examples of questions related to the automatic processing of natural language, to the analysis of molecular sequences, and to the management of textual databases.