Construction of optimal α-β leaf trees with applications to prefix code and information retrieval

In this paper, we study a special class of trees called $\alpha $-$\beta $ leaf trees with degree $r$. These trees arise in information retrieval problems as well as prefix coding problems. An efficient method for constructing optimal trees is presented. The method is combinatorial in nature instead of the integer programming approach followed by other authors to study similar problems. The construction time is linear to the number of leaves of the tree.