Succinct Data Structures for NLP-at-Scale

Matthias Petri, Trevor Cohn


Abstract
Succinct data structures involve the use of novel data structures, compression technologies, and other mechanisms to allow data to be stored in extremely small memory or disk footprints, while still allowing for efficient access to the underlying data. They have successfully been applied in areas such as Information Retrieval and Bioinformatics to create highly compressible in-memory search indexes which provide efficient search functionality over datasets which traditionally could only be processed using external memory data structures. Modern technologies in this space are not well known within the NLP community, but have the potential to revolutionise NLP, particularly the application to ‘big data’ in the form of terabyte and larger corpora. This tutorial will present a practical introduction to the most important succinct data structures, tools, and applications with the intent of providing the researchers with a jump-start into this domain. The focus of this tutorial will be efficient text processing utilising space efficient representations of suffix arrays, suffix trees and searchable integer compression schemes with specific applications of succinct data structures to common NLP tasks such as n-gram language modelling.
Anthology ID:
C16-3006
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Marcello Federico, Akiko Aizawa
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
20–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-3006
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthias Petri and Trevor Cohn. 2016. Succinct Data Structures for NLP-at-Scale. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts, pages 20–21, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Succinct Data Structures for NLP-at-Scale (Petri & Cohn, COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-3006.pdf