This document proposes space-efficient feature maps for approximating string alignment kernels. It introduces edit-sensitive parsing (ESP) to map strings to integer vectors, and then uses feature maps to map the integer vectors to compact feature vectors. Linear SVMs trained on these feature vectors can achieve similar performance as non-linear SVMs using alignment kernels, with greatly improved scalability. Experimental results on real-world string datasets show the proposed method significantly reduces training time and memory usage compared to state-of-the-art string kernel methods, while maintaining high classification accuracy.