Approximate Dictionary Searching at a Scale using Ternary Search Trees and Implicit Levenshtein Automata

Approximate Dictionary Searching refers to the problem of finding entries in a dictionary that match a search word either exactly or with a certain allowed distance between entry and search word. Extant computationally efficient data structures and algorithms addressing this problem typically do not scale well to large alphabets and/or dictionaries, often requiring prohibitive amounts of memory as the sizes of alphabets and dictionaries increase. This paper presents a data structure and an algorithm for approximate dictionary searching that rely on ternary search trees and implicit Levenshtein automata and scale well with the sizes of both alphabets and dictionaries.