Colored Range Queries and Document Retrieval

Colored range queries are a well-studied topic in computational geometry and database research that, in the past decade, have found exciting applications in information retrieval. In this paper we give improved time and space bounds for three important one-dimensional colored range queries — colored range listing, colored range top-k queries and colored range counting — and, thus, new bounds for various document retrieval problems on general collections of sequences. Specifically, we first describe a framework including almost all recent results on colored range listing and document listing, which suggests new combinations of data structures for these problems. For example, we give the fastest compressed data structures for colored range listing and document listing, and an efficient data structure for document listing whose size is bounded in terms of the high-order entropies of the library of documents. We then show how (approximate) colored top-k queries can be reduced to (approximate) range-mode queries on subsequences, yielding the first efficient data structure for this problem. Finally, we show how a modified wavelet tree can support colored range counting in logarithmic time and space that is succinct whenever the number of colors is superpolylogarithmic in the length of the sequence.