The Design of a High Performance Information Filtering System

Timothy A.H. Bell
Department of Computer Science, The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, Australia.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science, The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, Australia.

Status

Proc. 19th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Zurich, August 1996, pages 12--20.

Abstract

A high performance information filtering system has three main requirements: it must be effective in supplying users with useful information, it must be sufficiently fast in doing so, and it must be able to handle a large throughput of information efficiently. These three requirements pose a difficult problem, and no existing system is capable of meeting all three. In this paper we describe a system which combines a number of techniques from other information retrieval and filtering systems, and is capable of providing high performance on a typical workstation platform. We provide estimates of computing resource usage, and show that our system is also scalable.