High-order entropy-compressed text indexes

Abstract

We present a novel implementation of compressed suffix arrays exhibiting new tradeoffs between search time and space occupancy for a given text (or sequence) of n symbols over an alphabet σ, where each symbol is encoded by lgvσv bits. We show that compressed suffix arrays use just nHh + σ bits, while retaining full text indexing functionalities, such as searching any pattern sequence of length m in O(m lg vσv + polylog(n)) time. The term Hh ≤ lg vσv denotes the hth-order empirical entropy of the text, which means that our index is nearly optimal in space apart from lower-order terms, achieving asymptotically the empirical entropy of the text (with a multiplicative constant 1). If the text is highly compressible so that Hn = o(1) and the alphabet size is small, we obtain a text index with o(m) search time that requires only o(n) bits. Further results and tradeoffs are reported in the paper.