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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4070–4072Cite as

Text Compression

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Synonyms

Lossless data compression

Definition

Text compression involves changing the representation of a file so that the (binary) compressed output takes less space to store, or less time to transmit, but still the original file can be reconstructed exactly from its compressed representation.

Key Points

The benefit of compressing texts in computer applications is threefold: it reduces the amount of memory to store a text, it reduces the time for transmitting the text over a computer network, and, recently, it has been deployed to speed up algorithmic computations because they can better exploit the memory hierarchy available in modern PCs by reducing the disk access time, by increasing virtually the bandwidth and size of disk (or memory, cache), and by coming at a negligible cost because of the significant speed of current CPUs.

A text in uncompressed format, also called raw or plain text, is a sequence of symbols drawn from an alphabet Σ and represented in |log2|Σ|| bits each. Text...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Farruggia A, Ferragina P, Frangioni A, Venturini R. Bicriteria data compression. In: Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms; 2014. p. 1582–95.

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  2. Ferragina P, Giancarlo R, Manzini G, Sciortino M. Boosting textual compression in optimal linear time. J ACM. 2005;52(4):688–713.

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  3. Ferragina P, Luccio F, Manzini G, Muthukrishnan S. Compressing and searching XML data via two zips. In: Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference; 2006. p. 751–60.

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  4. Ferragina P, Nitto I, Venturini R. On optimally partitioning a text to improve its compression. Algorithmica. 2011;61(1):51–74.

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  5. Ferragina P, Nitto I, Venturini R. On the bit-complexity of Lempel-Ziv compression. SIAM J Comput. 2013;42(4):1521–41.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Navarro G, Mäkinen V. Compressed full-text indexes. ACM Comput Surv. 2007;39(1): Article no. 2.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Salomon D. Data compression: the complete reference. 4th ed. London: Springer; 2007.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Ferragina, Igor Nitto & Rossano Venturini

Authors
  1. Paolo Ferragina
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  2. Igor Nitto
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  3. Rossano Venturini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paolo Ferragina .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. of Computing Science, Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Mario A. Nascimento

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Cite this entry

Ferragina, P., Nitto, I., Venturini, R. (2018). Text Compression. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1151

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