Fast, Small, and Simple Document Listing on Repetitive Text Collections

Abstract

Document listing on string collections is the task of finding all documents where a pattern appears. It is regarded as the most fundamental document retrieval problem, and is useful in various applications. Many of the fastest-growing string collections are composed of very similar documents, such as versioned code and document collections, genome repositories, etc. Plain pattern-matching indexes designed for repetitive text collections achieve orders-of-magnitude reductions in space. Instead, there are not many analogous indexes for document retrieval. In this paper we present a simple document listing index for repetitive string collections of total length n that lists the distinct documents where a pattern of length m appears in time. We exploit the repetitiveness of the document array (i.e., the suffix array coarsened to document identifiers) to grammar-compress it while precomputing the answers to nonterminals, and store them in grammar-compressed form as well. Our experimental results show that our index sharply outperforms existing alternatives in the space/time tradeoff map.