Question

Given a lengthy document without spaces, punctuation, and capitalization:

eg: iresetthecomputeritstilldidntboot

Now add back in the punctation and capitalization.

Most of the words will be in a dictionary, but some strings, like proper names, will not. Given a dictionary (a list of words), design an algorithm to find the optimal way of “unconcatenating” a sequence of words (by minimizing unrecognized sequences of characters).

For example, the string “jesslookedjustliketimherbrother” would be optimally parsed as “JESS looked just like TIM her brother”. This parsing has seven unrecognized characters, which we have capitalized for clarity.

Solution

The solution given in the book is very hard to understand. It uses HashMap to memorize the previous result.

After long time of struggle, I finally solved it with traditional DP approach. The key idea is to consider: “whether I insert a space after this char, or not”.

The code is concise and easy to read.

Code

public static int parse(String doc, Trie dict) {
    int len = doc.length();
    int[] dp = new int[len + 1];
    // dp[i] denotes the number of special chars in first i chars of docs
    for (int i = 1; i <= len; i++) {
        dp[i] =  Integer.MAX_VALUE;
        for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) {
            String str = doc.substring(j, i);
            if (dict.contains(str, true)) {
                // consider (i to j) a valid word
                dp[i] = Math.min(dp[i], dp[j]);
            } else {
                // consider (i to j) special chars
                dp[i] = Math.min(dp[i], dp[j] + i - j);
            }
        }
    }
    return dp[len];
}