5 research outputs found
A practical index for approximate dictionary matching with few mismatches
Approximate dictionary matching is a classic string matching problem
(checking if a query string occurs in a collection of strings) with
applications in, e.g., spellchecking, online catalogs, geolocation, and web
searchers. We present a surprisingly simple solution called a split index,
which is based on the Dirichlet principle, for matching a keyword with few
mismatches, and experimentally show that it offers competitive space-time
tradeoffs. Our implementation in the C++ language is focused mostly on data
compaction, which is beneficial for the search speed (e.g., by being cache
friendly). We compare our solution with other algorithms and we show that it
performs better for the Hamming distance. Query times in the order of 1
microsecond were reported for one mismatch for the dictionary size of a few
megabytes on a medium-end PC. We also demonstrate that a basic compression
technique consisting in -gram substitution can significantly reduce the
index size (up to 50% of the input text size for the DNA), while still keeping
the query time relatively low
Simple, compact and robust approximate string dictionary
This paper is concerned with practical implementations of approximate string
dictionaries that allow edit errors. In this problem, we have as input a
dictionary of strings of total length over an alphabet of size
. Given a bound and a pattern of length , a query has to
return all the strings of the dictionary which are at edit distance at most
from , where the edit distance between two strings and is defined as
the minimum-cost sequence of edit operations that transform into . The
cost of a sequence of operations is defined as the sum of the costs of the
operations involved in the sequence. In this paper, we assume that each of
these operations has unit cost and consider only three operations: deletion of
one character, insertion of one character and substitution of a character by
another. We present a practical implementation of the data structure we
recently proposed and which works only for one error. We extend the scheme to
. Our implementation has many desirable properties: it has a very
fast and space-efficient building algorithm. The dictionary data structure is
compact and has fast and robust query time. Finally our data structure is
simple to implement as it only uses basic techniques from the literature,
mainly hashing (linear probing and hash signatures) and succinct data
structures (bitvectors supporting rank queries).Comment: Accepted to a journal (19 pages, 2 figures
Efficient Error-Correcting Geocoding
We study the problem of resolving a perhaps misspelled address of a location
into geographic coordinates of latitude and longitude. Our data structure
solves this problem within a few milliseconds even for misspelled and
fragmentary queries. Compared to major geographic search engines such as Google
or Bing we achieve results of significantly better quality
Building Blocks for Mapping Services
Mapping services are ubiquitous on the Internet. These services enjoy a considerable user base. But it is often overlooked that providing a service on a global scale with virtually millions of users has been the playground of an oligopoly of a select few service providers are able to do so. Unfortunately, the literature on these solutions is more than scarce. This thesis adds a number of building blocks to the literature that explain how to design and implement a number of features