{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/engineering-rank-select-data-structures-for","title":"Engineering Rank/Select Data Structures for Large-Alphabet Strings","arxiv_id":"2305.14461","date":"2023-05-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Diego Arroyuelo","Gabriel Carmona","Héctor Larrañaga","Francisco Riveros","Carlos Eugenio Rojas-Morales","Erick Sepúlveda"],"abstract":"Large-alphabet strings are common in scenarios such as information retrieval and natural-language processing. The efficient storage and processing of such strings usually introduces several challenges that are not witnessed in small-alphabets strings. This paper studies the efficient implementation of one of the most effective approaches for dealing with large-alphabet strings, namely the \\emph{alphabet-partitioning} approach. The main contribution is a compressed data structure that supports the fundamental operations $rank$ and $select$ efficiently. We show experimental results that indicate that our implementation outperforms the current realizations of the alphabet-partitioning approach. In particular, the time for operation $select$ can be improved by about 80%, using only 11% more space than current alphabet-partitioning schemes. We also show the impact of our data structure on several applications, like the intersection of inverted lists (where improvements of up to 60% are achieved, using only 2% of extra space), the representation of run-length compressed strings, and the distributed-computation processing of $rank$ and $select$ operations. In the particular case of run-length compressed strings, our experiments on the Burrows-Wheeler transform of highly-repetitive texts indicate that by using only about 0.98--1.09 times the space of state-of-the-art RLFM-indexes (depending on the text), the process of counting the number of occurrences of a pattern in a text can be carried out 1.23--2.33 times faster.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14461v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.14461v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"engineering-rank-select-data-structures-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/yhatoh/pef","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}