Inducing enhanced suffix arrays for string collections

Abstract

Constructing the suffix array for a string collection is an important task that may be performed by sorting the concatenation of all strings. In this article we present algorithms gSAIS and gSACA-K, which extend SAIS (Nong et al., 2011) [8] and SACA-K (Nong, 2013) [10] to construct the suffix array for a string collection maintaining their theoretical bounds, respecting the order among all suffixes, and improving their practical performance. gSACA-K is an optimal suffix array construction algorithm for string collections from constant alphabets. Moreover, we show how to modify gSAIS and gSACA-K to also compute the longest common prefix array and the document array as a byproduct of suffix sorting, with the same theoretical bounds. We performed experiments that showed that our algorithms have an outstanding practical performance.