What is the Time and Space complexity of following solution? - algorithm

Question

Problem statement:
Given a non-empty string s and a dictionary wordDict containing a list of non-empty words, add spaces in s to construct a sentence where each word is a valid dictionary word. Return all such possible sentences.
Note:
The same word in the dictionary may be reused multiple times in the segmentation.
You may assume the dictionary does not contain duplicate words.
Sample test case:
Input:
s = "catsanddog"
wordDict = ["cat", "cats", "and", "sand", "dog"]
Output:
[
"cats and dog",
"cat sand dog"
]
My Solution:
class Solution {
unordered_set<string> words;
unordered_map<string, vector<string> > memo;
public:
vector<string> getAllSentences(string s) {
if(s.size()==0){
return {""};
}
if(memo.count(s)) {
return memo[s];
}
string curWord = ""; vector<string> result;
for(int i = 0; i < s.size(); i++ ) {
curWord+=s[i];
if(words.count(curWord)) {
auto sentences = getAllSentences(s.substr(i+1));
for(string s : sentences) {
string sentence = curWord + ((int)s.size()>0? ((" ") + s) : "");
result.push_back(sentence);
}
}
}
return memo[s] = result;
}
vector<string> wordBreak(string s, vector<string>& wordDict) {
for(auto word : wordDict) {
words.insert(word);
}
return getAllSentences(s);
}
};
I am not sure about the time and space complexity. I think it should be 2^n where n is the length of given string s. Can anyone please help me to prove time and space complexity?
I have also some following questions:
If I don't use memo in the getAllSentences function what will be the
time complexity in this case?
Is there any better solution than this?

Answer 1

Let's try to go through the algorithm step by step but for specific wordDict to simplify the things.
So let wordDict be all the characters from a to z,
wordDict = ["a",..., "z"]
In this case if(words.count(curWord)) would be true every time when i = 0 and false otherwise.
Also, let's skip using memo cache (we'll add it later).
In the case above, we just got though string s recursively until we reach the end without any additional memory except result vector which gives the following:
time complexity is O(n!)
space complexity is O(1) - just 1 solution exists
where n - lenght of s
Now let's examine how using memo cache changes the situation in our case. Cache would contain n items - size of our string s which changes space complexity to O(n). Our time is the same since every there will be no hits by using memo cache.
This is the basis for us to move forward.
Now let's try to find how the things are changed if wordDict contains all the pairs of letters (and length of s is 2*something, so we could reach the end).
So, wordDict = ['aa','ab',...,'zz']
In this case we move forward with for 2 letters instead of 1 and everything else is the same, which gives us the following complexity withoug using memo cache:
time complexity is O((n/2)!)
space complexity is O(1) - just 1 solution exists
Memo cache would contain (n/2) items, giving a complexity of O(n) which also changes space complexity to O(n) but all the checks there are of different length.
Let's now imagine that wordDict contains both dictionaries we mentioned before ('a'...'z','aa'...'zz').
In this case we have the following complexity without using memo cache
time complexity is O((n)!) as we need to check the case for i=0 and i=1 which roughly doubles the number of checks we need to do for each step but on the other size it reduces the number of checks we have to do later since we move forward by 2 letters instead of one (this is the trickiest part for me).
Space complexity is ~O(2^n) since every additional char doubles the number of results.
Now let's think of the memo cache we have. It would be usefull for every 3 letters, because for example '...ab c...' gives the same as '...a bc...', so it reduces the number of calculations by 2 at every step, so our complexity would be the following
time complexity is roughly O((n/2)!) and we need O(2*n)=O(n) memory to store the memo. Let's also remember that in n/2 expression 2 reflects the cache effectiveness.
space complexity is O(2^n) - 2 here is a charateristic of the wordDict we've constructed
These were 3 cases for us to understand how the complexity is changing depending of the curcumstances. Now let's try to generalize it to the generic case:
time complexity is O((n/(l*e))!) where l = min length of words in wordDict, e - cache effectiveness (I would assume it 1 in general case but there might bt situations where it's different as we saw in the case above
space complexity is O(a^n) where a is a similarity of words in our wordDict, could be very very roughly estimated as P(h/l)=(h/l)! where h is max word length in a dictionary and l is min word length as (for example, if wordDict contains all combinations of up 3 letters, this gives us 3! combinations for every 6 letters)
This is how I see your approach and it's complexity.
As for improving the solution itself, I don't see any simple way to improve it. There might be an alternative way to divide the string in 3 parts and then processing each part separately but it would definitely work if we could get rid of searching the results and just count the number of results without displaying them.
I hope it helps.