Compressed Suffix Arrays and Suffix Trees with Applications to Text Indexing and String Matching

• Authors: Roberto Grossi;Jeffrey Scott Vitter
• Venue: SIAM Journal on Computing
• Year: 2005

The proliferation of online text, such as found on the World Wide Web and in online databases, motivates the need for space-efficient text indexing methods that support fast string searching. We model this scenario as follows: Consider a text $T$ consisting of $n$ symbols drawn from a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$. The text $T$ can be represented in $n \lg |\Sigma|$ bits by encoding each symbol with $\lg |\Sigma|$ bits. The goal is to support fast online queries for searching any string pattern $P$ of $m$ symbols, with $T$ being fully scanned only once, namely, when the index is created at preprocessing time. The text indexing schemes published in the literature are greedy in terms of space usage: they require $\Omega(n \lg n)$ additional bits of space in the worst case. For example, in the standard unit cost RAM, suffix trees and suffix arrays need $\Omega(n)$ memory words, each of $\Omega(\lg n)$ bits. These indexes are larger than the text itself by a multiplicative factor of $\Omega(\smash{\lg_{|\Sigma|} n})$, which is significant when $\Sigma$ is of constant size, such as in \textsc{ascii} or \textsc{unicode}. On the other hand, these indexes support fast searching, either in $O(m \lg |\Sigma|)$ time or in $O(m + \lg n)$ time, plus an output-sensitive cost $O(\mathit{occ})$ for listing the $\mathit{occ}$ pattern occurrences. We present a new text index that is based upon compressed representations of suffix arrays and suffix trees. It achieves a fast $\smash{O(m /\lg_{|\Sigma|} n + \lg_{|\Sigma|}^\epsilon n)}$ search time in the worst case, for any constant $0