A compression algorithm using integrated record information for translation dictionaries

A trie structure is a well-known method for retrieving natural language dictionaries. With the development of a variety of natural language processing systems, some types of dictionaries in a computer hard disk have common information. This paper presents a method of integrating these dictionaries into one. Although common information can be packed into one record, each field of the integrated record can be accessed from index tables. There are many long strings in the integrated dictionaries, such as compound words, idioms and frozen phrases which take much space for a huge set of keys when stored in the trie. A compression scheme is proposed by replacing long strings into corresponding leaf node numbers of the trie. The experimental observations show that the new method is more practical and efficient than previous ones.