Abstract

Tries offer text searches with costs which are independent of the size of the document being searched, and so are important for large documents requiring spelling checkers), case insensitivity, and limited approximate regular secondary storage. Approximate searches, in which the search pattern differs from the document by k substitutions, transpositions, insertions or deletions, have hitherto been carried out only at costs linear in the size of the document. We present a trie-based method whose cost is independent of document size. H. Shang and T.H. Merrett are at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montr'eal, Qu'ebec, Canada H3A 2A7, Email: fshang, timg@cs.mcgill.ca 100 Our experiments show that this new method significantly outperforms the nearest competitor for k=0 and k=1, which are arguably the most important cases. The linear cost (in k) of the other methods begins to catch up, for our small files, only at k=2. For larger files, complexity arguments i...

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