Compressed Text Indexes:From Theory to Practice!

A compressed full-text self-index represents a text in a compressed form and still answers queries efficiently. This technology represents a breakthrough over the text indexing techniques of the previous decade, whose indexes required several times the size of the text. Although it is relatively new, this technology has matured up to a point where theoretical research is giving way to practical developments. Nonetheless this requires significant programming skills, a deep engineering effort, and a strong algorithmic background to dig into the research results. To date only isolated implementations and focused comparisons of compressed indexes have been reported, and they missed a common API, which prevented their re-use or deployment within other applications. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. First, we present the existing implementations of compressed indexes from a practitioner's point of view. Second, we introduce the Pizza&Chili site, which offers tuned implementations and a standardized API for the most successful compressed full-text self-indexes, together with effective testbeds and scripts for their automatic validation and test. Third, we show the results of our extensive experiments on these codes with the aim of demonstrating the practical relevance of this novel and exciting technology

Handling Massive N-Gram Datasets Efficiently

This paper deals with the two fundamental problems concerning the handling of large n-gram language models: indexing, that is compressing the n-gram strings and associated satellite data without compromising their retrieval speed; and estimation, that is computing the probability distribution of the strings from a large textual source. Regarding the problem of indexing, we describe compressed, exact and lossless data structures that achieve, at the same time, high space reductions and no time degradation with respect to state-of-the-art solutions and related software packages. In particular, we present a compressed trie data structure in which each word following a context of fixed length k, i.e., its preceding k words, is encoded as an integer whose value is proportional to the number of words that follow such context. Since the number of words following a given context is typically very small in natural languages, we lower the space of representation to compression levels that were never achieved before. Despite the significant savings in space, our technique introduces a negligible penalty at query time. Regarding the problem of estimation, we present a novel algorithm for estimating modified Kneser-Ney language models, that have emerged as the de-facto choice for language modeling in both academia and industry, thanks to their relatively low perplexity performance. Estimating such models from large textual sources poses the challenge of devising algorithms that make a parsimonious use of the disk. The state-of-the-art algorithm uses three sorting steps in external memory: we show an improved construction that requires only one sorting step thanks to exploiting the properties of the extracted n-gram strings. With an extensive experimental analysis performed on billions of n-grams, we show an average improvement of 4.5X on the total running time of the state-of-the-art approach.Comment: Published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), February 2019, Article No: 2

Optimal Substring-Equality Queries with Applications to Sparse Text Indexing

We consider the problem of encoding a string of length $n$ from an integer alphabet of size $\sigma$ so that access and substring equality queries (that is, determining the equality of any two substrings) can be answered efficiently. Any uniquely-decodable encoding supporting access must take $n\log\sigma + \Theta(\log (n\log\sigma))$ bits. We describe a new data structure matching this lower bound when $\sigma\leq n^{O(1)}$ while supporting both queries in optimal $O(1)$ time. Furthermore, we show that the string can be overwritten in-place with this structure. The redundancy of $\Theta(\log n)$ bits and the constant query time break exponentially a lower bound that is known to hold in the read-only model. Using our new string representation, we obtain the first in-place subquadratic (indeed, even sublinear in some cases) algorithms for several string-processing problems in the restore model: the input string is rewritable and must be restored before the computation terminates. In particular, we describe the first in-place subquadratic Monte Carlo solutions to the sparse suffix sorting, sparse LCP array construction, and suffix selection problems. With the sole exception of suffix selection, our algorithms are also the first running in sublinear time for small enough sets of input suffixes. Combining these solutions, we obtain the first sublinear-time Monte Carlo algorithm for building the sparse suffix tree in compact space. We also show how to derandomize our algorithms using small space. This leads to the first Las Vegas in-place algorithm computing the full LCP array in $O(n\log n)$ time and to the first Las Vegas in-place algorithms solving the sparse suffix sorting and sparse LCP array construction problems in $O(n^{1.5}\sqrt{\log \sigma})$ time. Running times of these Las Vegas algorithms hold in the worst case with high probability.Comment: Refactored according to TALG's reviews. New w.h.p. bounds and Las Vegas algorithm

Fully-Functional Suffix Trees and Optimal Text Searching in BWT-runs Bounded Space

Indexing highly repetitive texts - such as genomic databases, software repositories and versioned text collections - has become an important problem since the turn of the millennium. A relevant compressibility measure for repetitive texts is r, the number of runs in their Burrows-Wheeler Transforms (BWTs). One of the earliest indexes for repetitive collections, the Run-Length FM-index, used O(r) space and was able to efficiently count the number of occurrences of a pattern of length m in the text (in loglogarithmic time per pattern symbol, with current techniques). However, it was unable to locate the positions of those occurrences efficiently within a space bounded in terms of r. In this paper we close this long-standing problem, showing how to extend the Run-Length FM-index so that it can locate the occ occurrences efficiently within O(r) space (in loglogarithmic time each), and reaching optimal time, O(m + occ), within O(r log log w ({\sigma} + n/r)) space, for a text of length n over an alphabet of size {\sigma} on a RAM machine with words of w = {\Omega}(log n) bits. Within that space, our index can also count in optimal time, O(m). Multiplying the space by O(w/ log {\sigma}), we support count and locate in O(dm log({\sigma})/we) and O(dm log({\sigma})/we + occ) time, which is optimal in the packed setting and had not been obtained before in compressed space. We also describe a structure using O(r log(n/r)) space that replaces the text and extracts any text substring of length ` in almost-optimal time O(log(n/r) + ` log({\sigma})/w). Within that space, we similarly provide direct access to suffix array, inverse suffix array, and longest common prefix array cells, and extend these capabilities to full suffix tree functionality, typically in O(log(n/r)) time per operation.Comment: submitted version; optimal count and locate in smaller space: O(r log log_w(n/r + sigma)

On Longest Repeat Queries Using GPU

Repeat finding in strings has important applications in subfields such as computational biology. The challenge of finding the longest repeats covering particular string positions was recently proposed and solved by \.{I}leri et al., using a total of the optimal $O(n)$ time and space, where $n$ is the string size. However, their solution can only find the \emph{leftmost} longest repeat for each of the $n$ string position. It is also not known how to parallelize their solution. In this paper, we propose a new solution for longest repeat finding, which although is theoretically suboptimal in time but is conceptually simpler and works faster and uses less memory space in practice than the optimal solution. Further, our solution can find \emph{all} longest repeats of every string position, while still maintaining a faster processing speed and less memory space usage. Moreover, our solution is \emph{parallelizable} in the shared memory architecture (SMA), enabling it to take advantage of the modern multi-processor computing platforms such as the general-purpose graphics processing units (GPU). We have implemented both the sequential and parallel versions of our solution. Experiments with both biological and non-biological data show that our sequential and parallel solutions are faster than the optimal solution by a factor of 2--3.5 and 6--14, respectively, and use less memory space.Comment: 14 page

Dynamic Data Structures for Document Collections and Graphs

In the dynamic indexing problem, we must maintain a changing collection of text documents so that we can efficiently support insertions, deletions, and pattern matching queries. We are especially interested in developing efficient data structures that store and query the documents in compressed form. All previous compressed solutions to this problem rely on answering rank and select queries on a dynamic sequence of symbols. Because of the lower bound in [Fredman and Saks, 1989], answering rank queries presents a bottleneck in compressed dynamic indexing. In this paper we show how this lower bound can be circumvented using our new framework. We demonstrate that the gap between static and dynamic variants of the indexing problem can be almost closed. Our method is based on a novel framework for adding dynamism to static compressed data structures. Our framework also applies more generally to dynamizing other problems. We show, for example, how our framework can be applied to develop compressed representations of dynamic graphs and binary relations