Third Programming Project Anagram Solution

0. Introduction.

 

An anagram is a word made by rearranging the letters of another word. For example, the English words dearer, reader, reared, and reread are anagrams of each other, and so are present, repents, and serpent. For this project, you will write a Java program that finds all sets of anagrams in a text file of English words. Your program will use an algorithm based on binary search trees, so it will be very fast.

How fast? The Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is one of the longest published novels ever written, with over a thousand pages, and more than a half million words. My version of the program reads the text of this novel in about half a second, finding 793 sets of anagrams. (Your computer may be faster or slower.) Among other things, this demonstrates that efficient programs require efficient data structures.

 

1. Theory.

 

We’ll start by considering why the obvious algorithms for this problem are too slow to work. Suppose we read all the words from a file, and then compare each word with every other word, testing if the two words are anagrams. Although this algorithm would indeed find all the anagrams among these words, it is very inefficient. If there are N words, then it requires O(N²) time: too slow for large files. For example, if War and Peace has

5 × 10⁵ words, then we might need 2.5 × 10¹¹ tests to find all its anagrams.

We  also  need  a  way  to  test  if  each  pair  of  words  are  anagrams.  We  might  generate  all  possible

rearrangements of one word, then test if one of them is equal to the other word. Unfortunately, if a word has w letters, then it can have at most w! distinct rearrangements, so comparing words this way takes O(w!) time: too slow for long words. For example, if a word has 10 letters, then we might test 10! = 3,628,800 rearrangements.

We conclude that we can’t compare each word with every other word, and we can’t compare words by rearranging  their  letters.  We  can  avoid  both  these  limitations  by  using  a  version  of  the  K-and-R  string comparison algorithm discussed in the lectures, and by using binary search trees. Here’s how to do that.

 

Summaries. Suppose that a word is a string of one or more lower case Roman letters a through z, without accents, blanks, or punctuation marks. Also suppose that the letter a corresponds to 0, that b corresponds to 1, etc., up to z that corresponds to 25. (These are not the ASCII or Unicode codes for those letters!) For each word, we make an array of 26 integers, called a summary of that word. In the summary, the element at index k tells how many times the letter corresponding to k appears in the word. For example, if we have the word present, then its summary looks like this, where the large numbers are array elements, and the small numbers are array indexes. Note that present has two e’s (at index 4), one n (at index 13), one p (at index 15), one r (at index 17), one s (at index 18), and one t (at index 19).

 

0  0  0  0  2  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   1   0   1   0   1   1   1   0   0   0   0   0   0

₀ ₁ ₂ ₃ ₄ ₅ ₆ ₇ ₈ ₉ ₁₀ ₁₁ ₁₂ ₁₃ ₁₄ ₁₅ ₁₆ ₁₇ ₁₈ ₁₉ ₂₀ ₂₁ ₂₂ ₂₃ ₂₄ ₂₅

 

Now, two words are anagrams if and only if their summaries are equal. For example, repents and serpent have the same summary as present. To test if two words are anagrams, we construct summaries for both words, then test their summaries for equality. We can construct a summary of a word with w letters in O(w) time, and we can test two summaries for equality in O(26) = O(1) time. As a result, we can test if two words are anagrams in linear time.

 

Comparing summaries. We can also test summaries S₁ and S₂ using a version of the K-and-R algorithm. It visits the elements of S₁ and S₂ one at a time, from left to right, until it finds the first pair of unequal elements.

 

Then it subtracts the element of S₂ from the element of S₁ and returns their difference. If it never finds unequal elements, then it returns 0. In either case, if the returned difference is less than 0, then S₁ < S₂; if it is equal to 0, then S₁ = S₂; if it is greater than 0, then S₁ S₂.

 

Anagram trees. Because of the K-and-R algorithm, summaries are totally ordered, so we can use them as keys in a binary search tree. We’ll call it an anagram tree. The anagram tree’s keys are summaries, and its values are linear singly linked lists of strings, in which each string represents a word. The anagram tree is the basis for our efficient anagram finding program.

Here’s how the program works. We start with an empty anagram tree. Then we read words as strings from a text file. Every time we read a word, we construct its summary. Then we search for a node in the tree that has the summary as its key, using the K-and-R algorithm to control the search. If we find the node, then we add the word to the node’s list (if it’s not already there). If we don’t find the node, then we add a new node to the list. The new node’s key is the summary, and its value is a list that contains the word.

After we’ve read all the words, there will be many nodes in the anagram tree, each with a list of one or more words. The words in each list are anagrams of each other, because they all have the same summary. We then traverse the tree, visiting each node. If we find a node whose list has only one word, then we ignore it, because that word is an anagram of only itself. However, if we find a node whose list has two or more words, then we print those words, because they are anagrams of each other.

Suppose the program reads N words. If we assume the words are read in random order, then it takes O(log N) time to add a word to the anagram tree. Since we add N words, it takes O(N log N) time to build the entire tree. Since the tree has N nodes, it takes O(N) time to traverse it. As a result, the program runs in O((N log N) + N) = O(N log N) time.

 

3. Implementation.

 

Here’s how to write the program. You must use the Java class Words to read words from a text file. Java source code for Words is available on Moodle. You don’t have to write it yourself. You don’t even have to know how it works internally. All you need to know is that it acts like an iterator, and that it has the following public methods.

 

public Words(String path)

 

Constructor. Initialize an instance of Words that reads words from a text file whose name is path. Throw an IllegalArgumentException if the file doesn’t exist, or if it can’t be read for some reason.

 

public boolean hasNext()

 

Test if there is a word waiting to be read from the text file.

 

public String next()

 

Read the next word from the text file, convert all its letters to lower case, and return it as a

String. It isn’t null, it isn’t empty, and it contains only lower case letters.

 

You must write a class called AnagramTree that represents an anagram tree as described in the previous section. It must have the following members. To simplify grading, you must use the same names as are shown here.

 

private class TreeNode

 

(5  points.)  A  node  in  the  AnagramTree.  It  must  have  four  private  slots  and  a  private constructor. The slot summary points to an array of 26 byte’s; it’s the key. The slot words points to a linear singly linked list of WordNode’s; it’s the value. The slots left and right point to TreeNode’s, or to null; they’re subtrees.

 

private class WordNode

(5  points.)  A  node  that  contains  a  word.  It  must  have  two  private  slots  and  a  private constructor. The slot word must point to a String that represents the word. The slot next must point to a WordNode, or to null; it’s the next node in a singly linked linear list.

 

public AnagramTree()

 

(5 points.) Constructor. Initialize an empty instance of AnagramTree.  It must have a head node.

 

public void add(String word)

 

(20 points.) Add word to the anagram tree, as described in the previous section. This String isn’t null, it isn’t empty, and it has only lower case letters. You must use compareSummaries to control the search through the tree. You must use the tree’s head node to avoid a special case when you add word to an empty tree.

 

public void anagrams()

 

(10 points.) Traverse the anagram tree, visiting each of its TreeNode’s exactly once. You must skip the tree’s head node. Every time you visit a TreeNode, you must print all the words from its linked list of WordNode’s, separated by blanks. However, if the linked list has only one node, then you must ignore it.

 

private int compareSummaries(byte[] left, byte[] right)

 

(10 points.) Here left and right are summaries: arrays of 26 byte’s. Compare left to right using the K-and-R algorithm. If left is less than right, then return an int less than 0. If left equals right, then return 0. If left is greater than right, then return an int greater than 0.

 

private byte[] stringToSummary(String word)

 

(10 points.) Return a summary for word. This String isn’t null, it isn’t empty, and it has only lower case letters. The summary must be represented as an array of 26 byte’s. If c is a character from word, then you must use the Java expression (c − 'a') to compute c’s index in that array. You must not use if’s or switch’es to compute c’s index.

 

You must also write a class called Anagrammer. It’s the driver, and it must have only a main method.

 

public static void main(String[] args)

 

(5 points.) Make an instance of Words that reads words from a text file. Make an empty AnagramTree. Read all the words from the text file and add them to the tree. Finally, traverse the tree to print all its anagrams.

 

Finally, here are some hints, notes, and threats.

 

Your AnagramTree class must have two nested classes: TreeNode and WordNode. Do not try to use only one nested class, because that won’t work.

 

You may add as many private variables to the class AnagramTree as you want. However, you must not use a private variable when a local variable would work instead.

 

You may write as many private helper methods as you want. You must write at least one helper for the method anagrams.

 

Your anagram tree must use a head node. You may design the head node however you want. However, recall that the head node’s key must appear nowhere else in the tree.

You must represent summaries as arrays of 26 byte’s. Do not use arrays of int’s, because that would take more memory. Recall that byte is Java’s smallest integer type: it can hold integers from −128 to 127. We assume that no word will have more than 127 appearances of the same letter, but you don’t have to check for this.

 

I tested my version of this program using a text file that contains Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It’s available for free from the Project Gutenberg web site. It’s also available on Moodle.

 

When I ran my program on the text of War and Peace, it produced this output, with one set of anagrams on each line. The anagrams appear in arbitrary order. If you run your program on War and Peace, then your anagrams may appear in a different order. You may want to test your program on a shorter file.

 

Some anagrams don’t look like English, or even like Russian. This may be because Words considers a word to be a series of one or more lower case letters. As a result, it incorrectly reads a word with punctuation, like don't, as don and t. It also incorrectly reads a word with upper case letters or accents, like Kurágin, as kur and gin. There may be misspellings in the original text too. Don’t worry about these things.

 

4. Deliverables.

 

Unlike the lab assignments, you must work on this project individually, without a partner. IT MUST BE DONE ENTIRELY BY YOURSELF, ALONE! The project is worth 70 points, and you must submit it to Moodle by 11:55 PM on the last day of class: 

Unlike the laboratory assignments, the TA’s will read your Java code in detail, awarding partial credit where possible. As a result, you must submit Java source code for the classes AnagramTree and Anagrammer together in one .java file. Do not submit source code for the class Words. If you have questions about how or where to turn in your work, then please contact your lab TA’s.

Do not submit the text of War and Peace! Do not submit the list of anagrams from War and Peace! These files are too big for the TA’s (or anyone else) to read. However, if you have tested your program on a short input file, and have a short list of anagrams from that file, then you may include both in comments at the end of your

.java file.