1. A method for compressing a corpus of documents stored in a memory of a computer system, comprising the steps of: converting each document in the corpus of documents stored in the memory into a tokenized representation that includes a document symbol table and a document position table; arranging in the memory the document symbol tables of the documents in the corpus of documents into groups of symbol tables with recurring symbols; and computing a collective symbol table for each group of document symbol tables arranged in the memory; said computing step compressing the tokenized representations of the documents stored in the memory by sharing recurring symbols across the documents in the corpus of documents; wherein said computing step hierarchically arranges each computed collective symbol table into a group symbol table, a residual document symbol table, and a residual page symbol table.
1. A method for compressing a corpus of documents stored in a memory of a computer system, comprising the steps of: converting each document in the corpus of documents stored in the memory into a tokenized representation that includes a document symbol table and a document position table; arranging in the memory the document symbol tables of the documents in the corpus of documents into groups of symbol tables with recurring symbols; and computing a collective symbol table for each group of document symbol tables arranged in the memory; said computing step compressing the tokenized representations of the documents stored in the memory by sharing recurring symbols across the documents in the corpus of documents; wherein said computing step hierarchically arranges each computed collective symbol table into a group symbol table, a residual document symbol table, and a residual page symbol table. 5. The method according to claim 1, further comprising the step of assembling the document symbol table of each document in the corpus of documents before performing said arranging step.