Universal compressed text indexing

The rise of repetitive datasets has lately generated a lot of interest in compressed self-indexes based on dictionary compression, a rich and heterogeneous family of techniques that exploits text repetitions in different ways. For each such compression scheme, several different indexing solutions have been proposed in the last two decades. To date, the fastest indexes for repetitive texts are based on the run-length compressed Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) and on the Compact Directed Acyclic Word Graph (CDAWG). The most space-efficient indexes, on the other hand, are based on the Lempel–Ziv parsing and on grammar compression. Indexes for more universal schemes such as collage systems and macro schemes have not yet been proposed. Very recently, Kempa and Prezza [STOC 2018] showed that all dictionary compressors can be interpreted as approximation algorithms for the smallest string attractor, that is, a set of text positions capturing all distinct substrings. Starting from this observation, in this paper we develop the first universal compressed self-index, that is, the first indexing data structure based on string attractors, which can therefore be built on top of any dictionary-compressed text representation. Let γ be the size of a string attractor for a text of length n. From known reductions, γ can be chosen to be asymptotically equal to any repetitiveness measure: number of runs in the BWT, size of the CDAWG, number of Lempel–Ziv phrases, number of rules in a grammar or collage system, size of a macro scheme. Our index takes words of space and supports locating the occ occurrences of any pattern of length m in time, for any constant . This is, in particular, the first index for general macro schemes and collage systems. Our result shows that the relation between indexing and compression is much deeper than what was previously thought: the simple property standing at the core of all dictionary compressors is sufficient to support fast indexed queries.