The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 13th Annual S- posium on
Combinatorial Pattern Matching held July 3-5 2002 at the Hotel Uminonakamichi in Fukuoka
Japan. They were selected from 37 abstracts s- mitted in response to the call for papers. In
addition there were invited lectures by Shinichi Morishita (University of Tokyo) and Hiroki
Arimura (Kyushu U- versity). Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) addresses issues of searching
and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees regular expr- sions graphs
point sets and arrays in various formats. The goal is to derive n- trivial combinatorial
properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior
performance for the corresponding computational problems. On the other hand an important goal
is to analyze and pinpoint the properties and conditions under which searches cannot be
performed e?ciently. Over the past decade a steady ?ow of high-quality research on this subject
has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a full-?edged area of algorithmics. This area
is continuing to grow even further due to the increasing demand for speed and e?ciency that
stems from important applications such as the World Wide Web computational biology computer
vision and multimedia systems. These involve requirements for information retrieval in
heterogeneous databases data compression and pattern recognition. The objective of the annual
CPM gathering is to provide an international forum for research in combinatorial p- tern
matching and related applications.
