Technische Universität München Full-text and Keyword Indexes for String Searching by Aleksander Cisłak arXiv:1508.06610v1 [cs.DS] 26 Aug 2015 Master’s Thesis in Informatics Department of Informatics Technische Universität München Full-text and Keyword Indexes for String Searching Indizierung von Volltexten und Keywords für Textsuche Author: Aleksander Cisłak (
[email protected]) Supervisor: prof. Burkhard Rost Advisors: prof. Szymon Grabowski; Tatyana Goldberg, MSc Master’s Thesis in Informatics Department of Informatics August 2015 Declaration of Authorship I, Aleksander Cisłak, confirm that this master’s thesis is my own work and I have docu- mented all sources and material used. Signed: Date: ii Abstract String searching consists in locating a substring in a longer text, and two strings can be approximately equal (various similarity measures such as the Hamming distance exist). Strings can be defined very broadly, and they usually contain natural language and biological data (DNA, proteins), but they can also represent other kinds of data such as music or images. One solution to string searching is to use online algorithms which do not preprocess the input text, however, this is often infeasible due to the massive sizes of modern data sets. Alternatively, one can build an index, i.e. a data structure which aims to speed up string matching queries. The indexes are divided into full-text ones which operate on the whole input text and can answer arbitrary queries and keyword indexes which store a dictionary of individual words. In this work, we present a literature review for both index categories as well as our contributions (which are mostly practice-oriented).