By Kurt Maly
Communications of the ACM,
July 1976,
Vol. 19 No. 7, Pages 409-415
10.1145/360248.360258
Comments
This paper presents a new data structure, called a compressed trie or C-trie, to be used in information retrieval systems. It has the same underlying m-ary tree structure as a trie, where m is a parameter of the trie, but whereas the fields of the nodes in a trie have to be large enough to hold a key or at least a pointer, the fields in a C-trie are only one bit long. In the analysis part of the paper it will be shown that for a collection of n keys the retrieval time, measured in terms of bit inspections of one key, is of the order logmn and the storage requirement of the order n·(m + log2n) bits. This improvement in storage requirements and retrieval time is achieved at the cost of decreasing the flexibility of the structure, and therefore updating costs are increased. First the C-trie is analyzed as a data structure, and then several methods of its use for relatively static databases are discussed.
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