Off-line compression by greedy textual substitution

• Published in: Proceedings of the IEEE Vol. 88; no. 11; pp. 1733 - 1744
• Main Authors: Apostolico, A., Lonardi, S.
• Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.11.2000; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Biological information theory; Biology computing; CD-ROMs; Coding, codes; Compressing; Computation; Computational efficiency; Computers in experimental physics; Councils; Data compression; Data presentation and visualization: algorithms and implementation; Dictionaries; Encoding; Exact sciences and technology; Inference; Information, signal and communications theory; Instruments, apparatus, components and techniques common to several branches of physics and astronomy; Physics; Production; Signal and communications theory; Statistics; Strings; Telecommunications and information theory; Texts; Textual data; Substitution; Texturation; Data compression; Greedy algorithm; Theoretical study; Data structures; Sequencing; Grammatical inference; Biological system
• ISSN: 0018-9219; 1558-2256
• DOI: 10.1109/5.892709

Greedy off-line textual substitution refers to the following approach to compression or structural inference. Given a long text string x, a substring W is identified such that replacing all instances of W in X except one by a suitable pair of pointers yields the highest possible contraction of X; the process is then repeated on the contracted text string until substrings capable of producing contractions can no longer be found. This paper examines computational issues arising in the implementation of this paradigm and describes some applications and experiments.