Compressed String Dictionaries

Abstract

The problem of storing a set of strings --- a string dictionary --- in compact form appears naturally in many cases. While classically it has represented a small part of the whole data to be processed (e.g., for Natural Language processing or for indexing text collections), more recent applications in Web engines, Web mining, RDF graphs, Internet routing, Bioinformatics, and many others, make use of very large string dictionaries, whose size is a significant fraction of the whole data. Thus novel approaches to compress them efficiently are necessary. In this paper we experimentally compare time and space performance of some existing alternatives, as well as new ones we propose. We show that space reductions of up to 20% of the original size of the strings is possible while supporting fast dictionary searches.