Compact suffx array?

Abstract

Suffx array is a data structure that can be used to index a large text file so that queries of its content can be answered quickly. Basically a suffx array is an array of all suffxes of the text in the lexicographic order. Whether or not a word occurs in the text can be answered in logarithmic time by binary search over the suffx array. In this work we present a method to compress a suffx array such that the search time remains logarithmic. Our experiments show that in some cases a suffx array can be compressed by our method such that the total space requirement is about half of the original.