Indexing text using the Ziv–Lempel trie

Let a text of u characters over an alphabet of size σ be compressible to n phrases by the LZ78 algorithm. We show how to build a data structure based on the Ziv–Lempel trie, called the LZ-index, that takes 4nlog₂n(1+o(1)) bits of space (that is, 4 times the entropy of the text for ergodic sources) and reports the R occurrences of a pattern of length m in worst case time O(m³logσ+(m+R)logn). We present a practical implementation of the LZ-index, which is faster than current alternatives when we take into consideration the time to report the positions or text contexts of the occurrences found.