Time- and Space-Efficient Regular Path Queries on Graphs

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, efficient method for executing regular path queries on labeled graphs by combining automaton simulation with advanced indexing, resulting in faster queries and reduced space usage.

Contribution

It introduces a new technique that integrates bit-parallel automaton simulation with wavelet tree indexing to improve efficiency in graph query processing.

Findings

Uses 3-5 times less space than existing methods.

Achieves 1.67 times faster query times on average.

Effectively processes multiple automaton states and graph nodes simultaneously.

Abstract

We introduce a time- and space-efficient technique to solve regularpath queries over labeled graphs. We combine a bit-parallel simula-tion of the Glushkov automaton of the regular expression with thering index introduced by Arroyuelo et al., exploiting its wavelettree representation of the triples in order to efficiently reach thestates of the product graph that are relevant for the query. Ourquery algorithm is able to simultaneously process several automa-ton states, as well as several graph nodes/labels. Our experimentalresults show that our representation uses 3-5 times less space thanthe alternatives in the literature, while generally outperformingthem in query times (1.67 times faster than the next best).