Compressed String Dictionaries via Data-Aware Subtrie Compaction

String dictionaries are a core component of a plethora of applications, so it is not surprising that they have been widely and deeply investigated in the literature since the introduction of tries in the ’60s. We introduce a new approach to trie compression, called COmpressed COllapsed Trie (CoCo-trie), that hinges upon a data-aware optimisation scheme that selects the best subtries to collapse based on a pool of succinct encoding schemes in order to minimise the overall space occupancy. CoCo-trie supports not only the classic lookup query but also the more sophisticated rank operation, formulated over a sorted set of strings. We corroborate our theoretical achievements with a large set of experiments over datasets originating from a variety of sources, e.g., URLs, DNA sequences, databases. We show that our CoCo-trie provides improved space-time trade-offs on all those datasets when compared against well-established and highly-engineered trie-based string dictionaries.