Dynamic Path-Decomposed Tries

Abstract: A keyword dictionary is an associative array whose keys are strings. Recent applications handling massive keyword dictionaries in main memory have a need for a space-efficient implementation. When limited to static applications, there are a number of highly-compressed keyword dictionaries based on the advancements of practical succinct data structures. However, as most succinct data structures are only efficient in the static case, it is still difficult to implement a keyword dictionary that is space efficient and dynamic. In this article, we propose such a keyword dictionary. Our main idea is to embrace the path decomposition technique, which was proposed for constructing cache-friendly tries. To store the path-decomposed trie in small memory, we design data structures based on recent compact hash trie representations. Experiments on real-world datasets reveal that our dynamic keyword dictionary needs up to 68% less space than the existing smallest ones, while achieving a relevant space-time tradeoff.