Suffix Trees on Words

We discuss an intrinsic generalization of the suffix tree, designed to index a string of length n which has a natural partitioning into m multicharacter substrings or words. This word suffix tree represents only the m suffixes that start at word boundaries. These boundaries are determined by delimiters, whose definition depends on the application. Since traditional suffix tree construction algorithms rely heavily on the fact that all suffixes are inserted, construction of a word suffix tree is nontrivial, in particular when only O(m) construction space is allowed. We solve this problem, presenting an algorithm with O(n) expected running time. In general, construction cost is (n) due to the need of scanning the entire input. In applications that require strict node ordering, an additional cost of sorting O(m ) characters arises, where m is the number of distinct words. In either case, this is a significant improvement over previously known solutions. Furthermore, when the alphabet is s...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1999
• Where: ALGORITHMICA
• Authors: Arne Andersson, N. Jesper Larsson, Kurt Swanson
• Keywords: ALGORITHMICA 1999, Suffix Tree, Suffix Tree Construction, Word Suffix Tree