Pattern-Matching

• Wildcard Query

  Matches terms using * (any characters) and ? (single character) glob patterns. Enables flexible term matching without edit distance.

• Suffix Tree

  Compressed trie of all suffixes enabling O(m) pattern matching without binary search; space-expensive but time-optimal.

• Suffix Array

  Sorted array of all suffixes; space-efficient full-text search enabling O(m log n) pattern matching with m = pattern length.

• Prefix Query

  Matches all terms beginning with a given string. Efficient with prefix-sorted indices or trie structures. Common in autocomplete.

• Aho-Corasick

  Multi-pattern string matching algorithm in O(n + m + z) time; enables efficient synonym/keyword highlighting and entity tagging.