Matching Regular-Typed Pattern Languages: Quadratic-Time Algorithms

Pattern languages (PAT) are a class of languages generated by expressions called patterns that may contain variables. In a pattern, each variable can be instantiated with an arbitrary string. Typed pattern languages extend PAT by associating a type (constraint) with each variable that restricts the domain of allowed substitutions. In this paper, we study regular-typed PAT (PATwRT), where all types are represented either by a regular expression or by an ε-NFA. We consider the PATwRT matching problem for patterns with a single repeated variable of the form P = α₁ β α₂ β ⋯ β α_K. We present simple algorithms whose running time is linear in K and quadratic in the input length N, with polynomial dependence on the sizes of the type representations. Our results extend previous quadratic-time work in two directions: (1) the quadratic-time algorithm for untyped PAT of Fernau et al. (STACS 2015), and (2) the quadratic-time algorithm for the restricted PATwRT K = 3, i.e., α₁ β α₂ β α₃ of Nogami and Terauchi (MFCS 2025).