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Documents authored by Giancarlo, Raffaele


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Wavelet Tree, Part I: A Brief History

Authors: Paolo Ferragina, Raffaele Giancarlo, Giovanni Manzini, Giovanna Rosone, Rossano Venturini, and Jeffrey Scott Vitter

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 132, From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday (2025)


Abstract
The Wavelet Tree data structure introduced in Grossi, Gupta, and Vitter [Grossi et al., 2003] is a space-efficient technique for rank and select queries that generalizes from binary symbols to an arbitrary multisymbol alphabet. Over the last two decades, it has become a pivotal tool in modern full-text indexing and data compression because of its properties and capabilities in compressing and indexing data, with many applications to information retrieval, genome analysis, data mining, and web search. In this paper, we survey the fascinating history and impact of Wavelet Trees; no doubt many more developments are yet to come. Our survey borrows some content from the authors' earlier works. This paper is divided into two parts: one (this one) giving a brief history of Wavelet Trees, including its varieties and practical implementations, dedicated to this Festschrift’s honoree Roberto Grossi; the second part deals with Wavelet Tree-based text indexing and is included in the Festschrift dedicated to Giovanni Manzini [Ferragina et al., 2025].

Cite as

Paolo Ferragina, Raffaele Giancarlo, Giovanni Manzini, Giovanna Rosone, Rossano Venturini, and Jeffrey Scott Vitter. Wavelet Tree, Part I: A Brief History. In From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 132, pp. 15:1-15:11, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)


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@InProceedings{ferragina_et_al:OASIcs.Grossi.15,
  author =	{Ferragina, Paolo and Giancarlo, Raffaele and Manzini, Giovanni and Rosone, Giovanna and Venturini, Rossano and Vitter, Jeffrey Scott},
  title =	{{Wavelet Tree, Part I: A Brief History}},
  booktitle =	{From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{15:1--15:11},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-391-1},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{132},
  editor =	{Conte, Alessio and Marino, Andrea and Rosone, Giovanna and Vitter, Jeffrey Scott},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.15},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238143},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: Wavelet tree, data compression, text indexing, compressed suffix array, Burrows-Wheeler transform, rank and select}
}
Document
Wavelet Tree, Part II: Text Indexing

Authors: Paolo Ferragina, Raffaele Giancarlo, Roberto Grossi, Giovanna Rosone, Rossano Venturini, and Jeffrey Scott Vitter

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 131, The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday (2025)


Abstract
The Wavelet Tree data structure introduced in Grossi, Gupta, and Vitter [Grossi et al., 2003] is a space-efficient technique for rank and select queries that generalizes from binary symbols to an arbitrary multisymbol alphabet. Over the last two decades, it has become a pivotal tool in modern full-text indexing and data compression because of its properties and capabilities in compressing and indexing data, with many applications to information retrieval, genome analysis, data mining, and web search. In this paper, we survey the fascinating history and impact of Wavelet Trees; no doubt many more developments are yet to come. Our survey borrows some content from the authors' earlier works. This paper is divided into two parts: The first part gives a brief history of Wavelet Trees, including its varieties and practical implementations, which appears in the Festschrift dedicated to Roberto Grossi; the second part (this one) deals with Wavelet Tree-based text indexing and is included in the Festschrift dedicated to Giovanni Manzini.

Cite as

Paolo Ferragina, Raffaele Giancarlo, Roberto Grossi, Giovanna Rosone, Rossano Venturini, and Jeffrey Scott Vitter. Wavelet Tree, Part II: Text Indexing. In The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 131, pp. 4:1-4:10, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)


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@InProceedings{ferragina_et_al:OASIcs.Manzini.4,
  author =	{Ferragina, Paolo and Giancarlo, Raffaele and Grossi, Roberto and Rosone, Giovanna and Venturini, Rossano and Vitter, Jeffrey Scott},
  title =	{{Wavelet Tree, Part II: Text Indexing}},
  booktitle =	{The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{4:1--4:10},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-390-4},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{131},
  editor =	{Ferragina, Paolo and Gagie, Travis and Navarro, Gonzalo},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.4},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239127},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: Wavelet tree, data compression, text indexing, compressed suffix array, Burrows-Wheeler transform, rank and select}
}
Document
A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations

Authors: Raffaele Giancarlo, Giovanni Manzini, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 128, 30th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2019)


Abstract
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform is a string transformation that plays a fundamental role for the design of self-indexing compressed data structures. Over the years, researchers have successfully extended this transformation outside the domains of strings. However, efforts to find non-trivial alternatives of the original, now 25 years old, Burrows-Wheeler string transformation have met limited success. In this paper we bring new lymph to this area by introducing a whole new family of transformations that have all the "myriad virtues" of the BWT: they can be computed and inverted in linear time, they produce provably highly compressible strings, and they support linear time pattern search directly on the transformed string. This new family is a special case of a more general class of transformations based on context adaptive alphabet orderings, a concept introduced here. This more general class includes also the Alternating BWT, another invertible string transforms recently introduced in connection with a generalization of Lyndon words.

Cite as

Raffaele Giancarlo, Giovanni Manzini, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino. A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations. In 30th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 128, pp. 12:1-12:12, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)


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@InProceedings{giancarlo_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2019.12,
  author =	{Giancarlo, Raffaele and Manzini, Giovanni and Rosone, Giovanna and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations}},
  booktitle =	{30th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2019)},
  pages =	{12:1--12:12},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-103-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{128},
  editor =	{Pisanti, Nadia and P. Pissis, Solon},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2019.12},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104833},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2019.12},
  annote =	{Keywords: Data Indexing and Compression, Burrows-Wheeler Transformation, Combinatorics on Words}
}
Document
Functional Information, Biomolecular Messages and Complexity of BioSequences and Structures

Authors: Raffaele Giancarlo, Davide Corona, Valeria Di Benedetto, Alessandra Gabriele, and Filippo Utro

Published in: Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 10231, Structure Discovery in Biology: Motifs, Networks & Phylogenies (2010)


Abstract
In the quest for a mathematical measure able to capture and shed light on the dual notions of information and complexity in biosequences, Hazen et al. have introduced the notion of Functional Information (FI for short). It is also the result of earlier considerations and findings by Szostak and Carothers et al. Based on the experiments by Charoters et al., regarding FI in RNA binding activities, we decided to study the relation existing between FI and classic measures of complexity applied on protein-DNA interactions on a genome-wide scale. Using classic complexity measures, i.e, Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov Complexity as both estimated by data compression, we found that FI applied to protein-DNA interactions is genuinely different from them. Such a fact, together with the non-triviality of the biological function considered, contributes to the establishment of FI as a novel and useful measure of biocomplexity. Remarkably, we also found a relationship, on a genome-wide scale, between the redundancy of a genomic region and its ability to interact with a protein. This latter finding justifies even more some principles for the design of motif discovery algorithms. Finally, our experiments bring to light methodological limitations of Linguistic Complexity measures, i.e., a class of measures that is a function of the vocabulary richness of a sequence. Indeed, due to the technology and associated statistical preprocessing procedures used to conduct our studies, i.e., genome-wide ChIP-chip experiments, that class of measures cannot give any statistically significant indication about complexity and function. A serious limitation due to the widespread use of the technology. References J.M. Carothers, S.C. Oestreich, J.H. Davis, and J.W. Szostack. Informational complexity and functional activity of RNA structures. J. AM. CHEM. SOC., 126 (2004), pp. 5130-5137. R.M. Hazen, P.L. Griffin, J.M. Carothers, and J.W. Szostak. Functional Information and the emergence of biocomplexity. Proc. of Nat. Acad. Sci, 104 (2007), pp. 8574-8581. J.W. Szostak. Functional Information: molecular messages, Nature, 423 (2003).

Cite as

Raffaele Giancarlo, Davide Corona, Valeria Di Benedetto, Alessandra Gabriele, and Filippo Utro. Functional Information, Biomolecular Messages and Complexity of BioSequences and Structures. In Structure Discovery in Biology: Motifs, Networks & Phylogenies. Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 10231, pp. 1-13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2010)


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@InProceedings{giancarlo_et_al:DagSemProc.10231.6,
  author =	{Giancarlo, Raffaele and Corona, Davide and Di Benedetto, Valeria and Gabriele, Alessandra and Utro, Filippo},
  title =	{{Functional Information, Biomolecular Messages and Complexity of BioSequences and Structures}},
  booktitle =	{Structure Discovery in Biology: Motifs, Networks \& Phylogenies},
  pages =	{1--13},
  series =	{Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (DagSemProc)},
  ISSN =	{1862-4405},
  year =	{2010},
  volume =	{10231},
  editor =	{Alberto Apostolico and Andreas Dress and Laxmi Parida},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.10231.6},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-26884},
  doi =		{10.4230/DagSemProc.10231.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: Functional activity, sequence complexity, combinatorics on words, protein-DNA interaction.}
}
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