Balanced Suffix Trees (Invited Lecture)

Abstract

We consider the problem of developing an efficient tree-based data structure for storing and searching large data sets. It is assumed that the data set is stored in secondary storage, and hence the goal is to reduce the number of accesses to the storage. The number of accesses is measured by the number of edges of the tree that get accessed while processing a query.

The data consists of a large number of words, each word being a string of characters. Each query consists of searching for a given word (member). Our goal is to design a simple data structure that permits efficient ex- ecution of the queries. The special case when the words are the suffixes of a string is the classic suffix tree data structure.

We discuss different approaches for reducing the depth of as suffix tree.