Compact and hash based variants of the suffix array

Abstract

AbstractFull-text indexing aims at building a data structure over a given text capable of efficiently finding arbitrary text patterns, and possibly requiring little space. We propose two suffix array inspired full-text indexes. One, called SA-hash, augments the suffix array with a hash table to speed up pattern searches due to significantly narrowed search interval before the binary search phase. The other, called FBCSA, is a compact data structure, similar to Mäkinen’s compact suffix array (MakCSA), but working on fixed size blocks. Experiments on the widely used Pizza & Chili datasets show that SA-hash is about 2–3 times faster in pattern searches (counts) than the standard suffix array, for the price of requiring 0.2n–1.1nbytes of extra space, wherenis the text length. FBCSA, in one of the presented variants, reduces the suffix array size by a factor of about 1.5–2, while it gets close in search times, winning in speed with its competitors known from the literature, MakCSA and LCSA.