c-trie++: A Dynamic Trie Tailored for Fast Prefix Searches

Given a dynamic set $K$ of $k$ strings of total length $n$ whose characters are drawn from an alphabet of size $\sigma$, a keyword dictionary is a data structure built on $K$ that provides locate, prefix search, and update operations on $K$. Under the assumption that $\alpha = w / \lg \sigma$ characters fit into a single machine word $w$, we propose a keyword dictionary that represents $K$ in $n \lg \sigma + \Theta(k \lg n)$ bits of space, supporting all operations in $O(m / \alpha + \lg \alpha)$ expected time on an input string of length $m$ in the word RAM model. This data structure is underlined with an exhaustive practical evaluation, highlighting the practical usefulness of the proposed data structure, especially for prefix searches - one of the most elementary keyword dictionary operations

Engineering a Textbook Approach to Index Massive String Dictionaries

We study the problem of engineering space-time efficient indexes that support membership and lexicographic (rank) queries on very large static dictionaries of strings. Our solution is based on a very simple approach that consists of decoupling string storage and string indexing by means of a blockwise compression of the sorted dictionary strings (to be stored in external memory) and a succinct implementation of a Patricia trie (to be stored in internal memory) built on the first string of each block. Our experimental evaluation on two new datasets, which are at least one order of magnitude larger than the ones used in the literature, shows that (i) the state-of-the-art compressed string dictionaries (such as FST, PDT, CoCo-trie) do not provide significant benefits if used in an indexing setting compared to Patricia tries, and (ii) our two-level approach enables the indexing of 3.5 billion strings taking 273 GB in less than 200 MB of internal memory, which is available on any commodity machine, while still guaranteeing comparable or faster query performance than those offered by array-based solutions used in modern storage systems, such as RocksDB, thus possibly influencing their future designs

Optimal-Time Queries on BWT-Runs Compressed Indexes

Indexing highly repetitive strings (i.e., strings with many repetitions) for fast queries has become a central research topic in string processing, because it has a wide variety of applications in bioinformatics and natural language processing. Although a substantial number of indexes for highly repetitive strings have been proposed thus far, developing compressed indexes that support various queries remains a challenge. The run-length Burrows-Wheeler transform (RLBWT) is a lossless data compression by a reversible permutation of an input string and run-length encoding, and it has received interest for indexing highly repetitive strings. LF and ?^{-1} are two key functions for building indexes on RLBWT, and the best previous result computes LF and ?^{-1} in O(log log n) time with O(r) words of space for the string length n and the number r of runs in RLBWT. In this paper, we improve LF and ?^{-1} so that they can be computed in a constant time with O(r) words of space. Subsequently, we present OptBWTR (optimal-time queries on BWT-runs compressed indexes), the first string index that supports various queries including locate, count, extract queries in optimal time and O(r) words of space