[gate-users] Is Hash Gazetteer fast, greedy and/or what else?

[Massimiliano C. <mas...@gm...>]

Hi all!
I'm reading this
http://gate.ac.uk/sale/tao/splitch13.html#sec:gazetteers:hash
but there is something not much clear to me:
"On first sight it seems that this algorithm is certainly much more 
memory-consuming than a finite state machine (FSM) (...) but this is 
actually not so important (...) On the other hand, one advantage of the 
algorithm is that, although unconventional, on average it takes four 
times less memory and works three times faster than an optimized FSM 
implementation."
Thus, "the strange idea of Atanas Kiryakov, that searching in HashMaps 
will be faster than a search in a Finite State Machine (FSM)" is right 
or not? Is the Hash Gazetteer fast and low-memory consuming or what?
Massi