Universal Indexes for Highly Repetitive Document Collections

Indexing highly repetitive collections has become a relevant problem with the emergence of large repositories of versioned documents, among other applications. These collections may reach huge sizes, but are formed mostly of documents that are near-copies of others. Traditional techniques for indexing these collections fail to properly exploit their regularities in order to reduce space. We introduce new techniques for compressing inverted indexes that exploit this near-copy regularity. They are based on run-length, Lempel-Ziv, or grammar compression of the differential inverted lists, instead of the usual practice of gap-encoding them. We show that, in this highly repetitive setting, our compression methods significantly reduce the space obtained with classical techniques, at the price of moderate slowdowns. Moreover, our best methods are universal, that is, they do not need to know the versioning structure of the collection, nor that a clear versioning structure even exists. We also introduce compressed self-indexes in the comparison. These are designed for general strings (not only natural language texts) and represent the text collection plus the index structure (not an inverted index) in integrated form. We show that these techniques can compress much further, using a small fraction of the space required by our new inverted indexes. Yet, they are orders of magnitude slower.Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sk{\l}odowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 69094

Document Retrieval on Repetitive Collections

Document retrieval aims at finding the most important documents where a pattern appears in a collection of strings. Traditional pattern-matching techniques yield brute-force document retrieval solutions, which has motivated the research on tailored indexes that offer near-optimal performance. However, an experimental study establishing which alternatives are actually better than brute force, and which perform best depending on the collection characteristics, has not been carried out. In this paper we address this shortcoming by exploring the relationship between the nature of the underlying collection and the performance of current methods. Via extensive experiments we show that established solutions are often beaten in practice by brute-force alternatives. We also design new methods that offer superior time/space trade-offs, particularly on repetitive collections.Comment: Accepted to ESA 2014. Implementation and experiments at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/suds/rlcsa

Rank, select and access in grammar-compressed strings

Given a string $S$ of length $N$ on a fixed alphabet of $\sigma$ symbols, a grammar compressor produces a context-free grammar $G$ of size $n$ that generates $S$ and only $S$. In this paper we describe data structures to support the following operations on a grammar-compressed string: \mbox{rank}_c(S,i) (return the number of occurrences of symbol $c$ before position $i$ in $S$); \mbox{select}_c(S,i) (return the position of the $i$th occurrence of $c$ in $S$); and \mbox{access}(S,i,j) (return substring $S[i,j]$). For rank and select we describe data structures of size $O(n\sigma\log N)$ bits that support the two operations in $O(\log N)$ time. We propose another structure that uses $O(n\sigma\log (N/n)(\log N)^{1+\epsilon})$ bits and that supports the two queries in $O(\log N/\log\log N)$, where $\epsilon>0$ is an arbitrary constant. To our knowledge, we are the first to study the asymptotic complexity of rank and select in the grammar-compressed setting, and we provide a hardness result showing that significantly improving the bounds we achieve would imply a major breakthrough on a hard graph-theoretical problem. Our main result for access is a method that requires $O(n\log N)$ bits of space and $O(\log N+m/\log_\sigma N)$ time to extract $m=j-i+1$ consecutive symbols from $S$. Alternatively, we can achieve $O(\log N/\log\log N+m/\log_\sigma N)$ query time using $O(n\log (N/n)(\log N)^{1+\epsilon})$ bits of space. This matches a lower bound stated by Verbin and Yu for strings where $N$ is polynomially related to $n$.Comment: 16 page

Online Self-Indexed Grammar Compression

Although several grammar-based self-indexes have been proposed thus far, their applicability is limited to offline settings where whole input texts are prepared, thus requiring to rebuild index structures for given additional inputs, which is often the case in the big data era. In this paper, we present the first online self-indexed grammar compression named OESP-index that can gradually build the index structure by reading input characters one-by-one. Such a property is another advantage which enables saving a working space for construction, because we do not need to store input texts in memory. We experimentally test OESP-index on the ability to build index structures and search query texts, and we show OESP-index's efficiency, especially space-efficiency for building index structures.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 22nd edition of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE2015

Universal Compressed Text Indexing

The rise of repetitive datasets has lately generated a lot of interest in compressed self-indexes based on dictionary compression, a rich and heterogeneous family that exploits text repetitions in different ways. For each such compression scheme, several different indexing solutions have been proposed in the last two decades. To date, the fastest indexes for repetitive texts are based on the run-length compressed Burrows-Wheeler transform and on the Compact Directed Acyclic Word Graph. The most space-efficient indexes, on the other hand, are based on the Lempel-Ziv parsing and on grammar compression. Indexes for more universal schemes such as collage systems and macro schemes have not yet been proposed. Very recently, Kempa and Prezza [STOC 2018] showed that all dictionary compressors can be interpreted as approximation algorithms for the smallest string attractor, that is, a set of text positions capturing all distinct substrings. Starting from this observation, in this paper we develop the first universal compressed self-index, that is, the first indexing data structure based on string attractors, which can therefore be built on top of any dictionary-compressed text representation. Let $\gamma$ be the size of a string attractor for a text of length $n$. Our index takes $O(\gamma\log(n/\gamma))$ words of space and supports locating the $occ$ occurrences of any pattern of length $m$ in $O(m\log n + occ\log^{\epsilon}n)$ time, for any constant $\epsilon>0$. This is, in particular, the first index for general macro schemes and collage systems. Our result shows that the relation between indexing and compression is much deeper than what was previously thought: the simple property standing at the core of all dictionary compressors is sufficient to support fast indexed queries.Comment: Fixed with reviewer's comment

Improved ESP-index: a practical self-index for highly repetitive texts

While several self-indexes for highly repetitive texts exist, developing a practical self-index applicable to real world repetitive texts remains a challenge. ESP-index is a grammar-based self-index on the notion of edit-sensitive parsing (ESP), an efficient parsing algorithm that guarantees upper bounds of parsing discrepancies between different appearances of the same subtexts in a text. Although ESP-index performs efficient top-down searches of query texts, it has a serious issue on binary searches for finding appearances of variables for a query text, which resulted in slowing down the query searches. We present an improved ESP-index (ESP-index-I) by leveraging the idea behind succinct data structures for large alphabets. While ESP-index-I keeps the same types of efficiencies as ESP-index about the top-down searches, it avoid the binary searches using fast rank/select operations. We experimentally test ESP-index-I on the ability to search query texts and extract subtexts from real world repetitive texts on a large-scale, and we show that ESP-index-I performs better that other possible approaches.Comment: This is the full version of a proceeding accepted to the 11th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA2014

Optimal-Time Text Indexing 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 Transform (BWT). 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 $r$. Since then, a number of other indexes with space bounded by other measures of repetitiveness --- the number of phrases in the Lempel-Ziv parse, the size of the smallest grammar generating the text, the size of the smallest automaton recognizing the text factors --- have been proposed for efficiently locating, but not directly counting, the occurrences of a pattern. 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 $O(r\log(n/r))$ space, on a RAM machine of $w=\Omega(\log n)$ bits. Within $O(r\log (n/r))$ space, our index can also count in optimal time $O(m)$. Raising the space to $O(r w\log_\sigma(n/r))$, we support count and locate in $O(m\log(\sigma)/w)$ and $O(m\log(\sigma)/w+occ)$ 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 $\ell$ in almost-optimal time $O(\log(n/r)+\ell\log(\sigma)/w)$. (...continues...