Searching in compressed dictionaries

We introduce two new methods to represent a prefix omission method (POM) file so that direct search can be done in these compressed dictionaries. The processing time is typically twice as fast for the Fibonacci variant than for the Huffman based algorithm, and also compared to decoding a Huffman encoded POM file and searching on the uncompressed version. We see that in the case of small files, which is the important application since dictionaries are usually kept in small chunks, the Fibonacci variant is much faster than decoding and searching or than the POM-Huffman method. Even though the compression performance might be slightly inferior to the character version of Huffman (but still generally better than the bit version), this might well be a price worth paying for faster processing.