A pattern (i. e., a string of variables and terminals) maps to a word, if this is obtained by uniformly replacing the variables by terminal words; deciding this is NP-complete. We present efficient algorithms\footnote{The computational model we use is the standard unit-cost RAM with logarithmic word size. Also, all logarithms appearing in our time complexity evaluations are in base 2.} that solve this problem for restricted classes of patterns. Furthermore, we show that it is NP-complete to decide, for a given number k and a word w, whether w can be factorised into k distinct factors; this shows that the injective version (i.e., different variables are replaced by different words) of the above matching problem is NP-complete even for very restricted cases.

Pseudo-repetitions are a natural generalization of the classical notion of repetitions in sequences. We solve fundamental algorithmic questions on pseudo-repetitions by application of insightful combinatorial results on words. More precisely, we efficiently decide whether a word is a pseudo-repetition and find all the pseudo-repetitive factors of a word.