SIGIR'98 posters: Term-ordered Query Evaluation versus Document-ordered Query Evaluation for Large Document Databases

Term-ordered Query Evaluation versus Document-ordered Query Evaluation for Large Document Databases


Marcin Kaszkiel
Department of Computer Science, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia.

Justin Zobel
Department of Computer Science, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia.


Abstract

There are two main families of technique for efficient processing of ranked queries on large text collections: document-ordered processing and term-ordered processing. In this note we compare these techniques experimentally. We show that they have similar costs for short queries, but that for long queries document-ordered processing is much more costly. Overall, we conclude that term-ordered processing, with the refinements of limited accumulators and hierarchical index structuring, is the more efficient mechanism.


SIGIR'98
24-28 August 1998
Melbourne, Australia.
sigir98@cs.mu.oz.au.