Suffix arrays with a twist

TL;DR

This paper explores various enhancements to suffix arrays, including navigation strategies, data layout optimizations, and auxiliary data structures, to improve search efficiency and space-time tradeoffs.

Contribution

It introduces novel modifications to suffix array construction and querying, such as optimized navigation, B-tree layouts, compressed prefix lookup tables, and caching techniques.

Findings

B-tree data layout improves search speed

Optimized interval boundary search significantly reduces query time

Compressed prefix lookup tables save space without sacrificing performance

Abstract

The suffix array is a classic full-text index, combining effectiveness with simplicity. We discuss three approaches aiming to improve its efficiency even more: changes to the navigation, data layout and adding extra data. In short, we show that $(i)$ how we search for the right interval boundary impacts significantly the overall search speed, $(ii)$ a B-tree data layout easily wins over the standard one, $(iii)$ the well-known idea of a lookup table for the prefixes of the suffixes can be refined with using compression, $(iv)$ caching prefixes of the suffixes in a helper array can pose a(nother) practical space-time tradeoff.