Miguel A. Martínez-Prieto

Francisco Claude, Antonio Fariña, Miguel A. Martínez-Prieto et al.

Indexing highly repetitive collections has become a relevant problem with the emergence of large repositories of versioned documents, among other applications. These collections may reach huge sizes, but are formed mostly of documents that are near-copies of others. Traditional techniques for indexing these collections fail to properly exploit their regularities in order to reduce space. We introduce new techniques for compressing inverted indexes that exploit this near-copy regularity. They are based on run-length, Lempel-Ziv, or grammar compression of the differential inverted lists, instead of the usual practice of gap-encoding them. We show that, in this highly repetitive setting, our compression methods significantly reduce the space obtained with classical techniques, at the price of moderate slowdowns. Moreover, our best methods are universal, that is, they do not need to know the versioning structure of the collection, nor that a clear versioning structure even exists. We also introduce compressed self-indexes in the comparison. These are designed for general strings (not only natural language texts) and represent the text collection plus the index structure (not an inverted index) in integrated form. We show that these techniques can compress much further, using a small fraction of the space required by our new inverted indexes. Yet, they are orders of magnitude slower.

Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Rafael C. Carrasco, Miguel A. Martínez-Prieto et al.

Large bilingual parallel texts (also known as bitexts) are usually stored in a compressed form, and previous work has shown that they can be more efficiently compressed if the fact that the two texts are mutual translations is exploited. For example, a bitext can be seen as a sequence of biwords ---pairs of parallel words with a high probability of co-occurrence--- that can be used as an intermediate representation in the compression process. However, the simple biword approach described in the literature can only exploit one-to-one word alignments and cannot tackle the reordering of words. We therefore introduce a generalization of biwords which can describe multi-word expressions and reorderings. We also describe some methods for the binary compression of generalized biword sequences, and compare their performance when different schemes are applied to the extraction of the biword sequence. In addition, we show that this generalization of biwords allows for the implementation of an efficient algorithm to look on the compressed bitext for words or text segments in one of the texts and retrieve their counterpart translations in the other text ---an application usually referred to as translation spotting--- with only some minor modifications in the compression algorithm.

Sandra Álvarez-García, Nieves R. Brisaboa, Javier D. Fernández et al.

The Web of Data has been gaining momentum and this leads to increasingly publish more semi-structured datasets following the RDF model, based on atomic triple units of subject, predicate, and object. Although it is a simple model, compression methods become necessary because datasets are increasingly larger and various scalability issues arise around their organization and storage. This requirement is more restrictive in RDF stores because efficient SPARQL resolution on the compressed RDF datasets is also required. This article introduces a novel RDF indexing technique (called k2-triples) supporting efficient SPARQL resolution in compressed space. k2-triples, uses the predicate to vertically partition the dataset into disjoint subsets of pairs (subject, object), one per predicate. These subsets are represented as binary matrices in which 1-bits mean that the corresponding triple exists in the dataset. This model results in very sparse matrices, which are efficiently compressed using k2-trees. We enhance this model with two compact indexes listing the predicates related to each different subject and object, in order to address the specific weaknesses of vertically partitioned representations. The resulting technique not only achieves by far the most compressed representations, but also the best overall performance for RDF retrieval in our experiments. Our approach uses up to 10 times less space than a state of the art baseline, and outperforms its performance by several order of magnitude on the most basic query patterns. In addition, we optimize traditional join algorithms on k2-triples and define a novel one leveraging its specific features. Our experimental results show that our technique overcomes traditional vertical partitioning for join resolution, reporting the best numbers for joins in which the non-joined nodes are provided, and being competitive in the majority of the cases.