Keyword-driven Suffix Arrays for On-line Keyword Searching from Documents in Chinese

On-line keyword searching from documents in Chinese tends to use inverted indexing as the main technique, which has its difficulties. Suffix Array is widely used for processing text in Western languages. However, it fails to get widely used in Chinese processing because of the speciality of Chinese. Suffix Array is a powerful tool. However it costs too much space. That is the major bottleneck of suffix Array. A data structure called Keyword-driven Suffix Array is proposed in this paper for on-line keyword searching from documents in Chinese, based on observation of on-line search pattern and traits of Chinese. Space efficiency is improved a lot using this data structure. When the document database is large enough, space efficiency is improved by about 5/6 using this data structure without sacrificing its time efficiency.