11,554 research outputs found
Re-Pair Compression of Inverted Lists
Compression of inverted lists with methods that support fast intersection
operations is an active research topic. Most compression schemes rely on
encoding differences between consecutive positions with techniques that favor
small numbers. In this paper we explore a completely different alternative: We
use Re-Pair compression of those differences. While Re-Pair by itself offers
fast decompression at arbitrary positions in main and secondary memory, we
introduce variants that in addition speed up the operations required for
inverted list intersection. We compare the resulting data structures with
several recent proposals under various list intersection algorithms, to
conclude that our Re-Pair variants offer an interesting time/space tradeoff for
this problem, yet further improvements are required for it to improve upon the
state of the art
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
- …