Moura, Edleno S. deFerreira, Bergda Silva, AltigranBaeza Yates, Ricardo2025-10-072025-10-072024de Moura ES, Ferreira B, da Silva A, Baeza-Yates R. BWBEV: a bitwise query processing algorithm for approximate prefix search. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society. 2024 Oct 27;30(1):527-41. DOI: 10.5753/jbcs.2024.42361678-4804http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71410We tackle the challenge of conducting an approximate prefix search within datasets of strings. We explore using a bit-parallelism technique to compute the edit distance between distinct strings and illustrate its adaptation for an approximate prefix search procedure referred to as BWBEV. This technique employs a unary representation of edit vectors alongside bitwise operations to efficiently update these vectors during the edit distance computation. We also show how to apply our new bit-parallelism technique strategy to online edit distance computation between strings without index structure. Our experiments with BWBEV applied to approximate prefix search for a query autocompletion task revealed a substantial acceleration of over 36% when contrasted against state-of-the-art methods.application/pdfengCopyright (c) 2024 Edleno S. de Moura, Berg Ferreira, Altigran da Silva, Ricardo Baeza-Yates. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.5753/jbcs.2024.4236Bit-parallelismAutocompleteTrieError toleranceinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess