Hello friends,

I am converting a lexical processor I wrote in Java to Perl; text processing is supposed to be very good in Perl, and I'm using it as an opportunity to learn Perl. However, although my initial write-up produces the right output, it does it around 70 times slower than my Java implementation where I was using a home-made Trie. According to Diag::NYTProf, the hangup is in _walk_tree of Tree::Trie, which brings me to my question: what is a highly time-effective way to perform matching for words and/or phrases against a target sentence, where the match will also return/allow access to supplementary data on the matched item?

Here is the algorithm I need to implement efficiently: 

my $lexicon = $csv -> parse;    # words to match against, and suppleme
+ntary data to go with matches
foreach <tweet> {
    foreach <word_in_tweet> {
           if ($lexicon includes <word_in_tweet>) {
               save match.supplementary_data TO tweet.result_data;
     }
   }
}

[download]

Supplementary data includes topics and sentiment values corresponding to each word/phrase in my dictionary. In the end, I need to know all the topics that match in each tweet.

Important caveat: The dictionary may include multi-word entries, so these need to be matched as well and preferred over shorter matches.

The Question

What might be the best Perl structure to fulfill my needs for:
  1. Matching each and every word and multi-word phrase from my dictionary?
  2. Retrieving supplementary dictionary data for each matched word/phrase?
  3. Fulfilling these points with high efficiency?

Is there a more efficient tree implementation? Is Perl's internal hash implementation likely to offer sufficiently efficient alternatives? Can you think of something I'm missing?

Thank you very much for your help!

Update:

For my project, the best results were in line with BrowserUK's suggestion: hashes were vastly superior, although a little trickier to get multi-word matches than regex would have been. Switching from Trie to Hash improved my speed by a factor of nearly 800.

In reply to Efficient matching with accompanying data by Endless

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