Best way to handle 3 sets of data

Question

Hi all,
Hope you are all well. Just to let you know that this is an assignment problem, but I am not specifically looking for coding to complete it, just snippets to outline your ideas, perhaps.
I am working on a diphonetic dictionary problem. Think of a diphone as a String in the context of this question.
Removing the complexity, suffice it to say that I have a TreeSet<String> dictDiphoneSet (...basically a TreeSet of Strings)
I also have an ArrayList<DiphoneEntry> diphoneEntriesList, where I can do for each entry:
getDictWord() ....returns a String
getDictDiphones() ....returns a String that is delimited by spaces
getNumDiphones() ....returns an int / IntegerWhat I want to do is
loop until dictDiphoneSet is empty:
@ take the getDictWords with the largest getNumDiphones,
@ and remove them from the dictDiphoneSet TreeSet, noting that the getNumDiphones <= number of elements in the dictDiphoneSet each time they are removed from dictDiphoneSet
end loop
I could easily do this with three ArrayLists, but I want to be more efficient.
I was thinking about using a HashMap, where Key = getNumDiphones and the Value = an ArrayList where each entry is getDictDiphones of a particular word that has getNumDiphones number of diphones, and:
loop until dictDiphoneSet is empty
@ start with the largest Key available that is <= dictDiphoneSet.size()
@ iterate through each member of this new Array list that comes under as the value of the Key, StringTokenise the member to get each individual diphone
@ remove the diphones of the member from the set. Ignore diphones in this member that are not in the set.
end loop
[Remark: at the beginning, largest Key available >> dictDiphoneSet.size(), but as removals from the set occur, these two will approximate to each other]
However, I need to monitor the getDictWord that created the getDictDiphones that removed elements from the set, as I need to know the list of words that cover all the diphones. My problem here is if I HashMap with this Key, Value pair, how would I determine the getDictWord? To me the inefficiency would be to look up getDictWord by using getDictPhones - a horrible mess of programming would result. Another inefficiency is the fact that a lot of members in the ArrayList would come under the 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Keys... is this a problem?
I am not looking for too much ACTUAL code, more in terms of the best data structure to use?
Suggestions welcome. Further clarifications can be made if required.
Edited by: Stephen.Hogan on May 11, 2009 9:06 AM

Answer 1

I'm not sure that I have understood your problem, but I would either sort the list first (See Collections.sort) to reduce the number of comparisions needed or add the DiphoneEntry instances to a TreeMap<Integer, List<DiphoneEntry>, where Integer is the value returned by getNumDiphones(). You can then pretty easy get all DiphoneEntries within a certain range. See the Javadoc for TreeMap for more details.
Kaj