Efficient Set Intersection for Inverted Indexing

J. Shane Culpepper
School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Victoria 3001, Australia.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Status

ACM Trans. Information Systems, 29(1):1.1-1.25, December 2010.

Abstract

Conjunctive Boolean queries are a key component of modern information retrieval systems, especially when web-scale repositories are being searched. A conjunctive query q is equivalent to a |q|-way intersection over ordered sets of integers, where each set represents the documents containing one of the terms, and each integer in each set is an ordinal document identifier. As is the case with many computing applications, there is tension between the way in which the data is represented, and the ways in which it is to be manipulated. In particular, the sets representing index data for typical document collections are highly compressible, but are processed using random access techniques, meaning that methods for carrying out set intersections must be alert to issues to do with access patterns and data representation. Our purpose in this paper is to explore these tradeoffs, by investigating intersection techniques that make use of both uncompressed "integer" representations, as well as compressed arrangements. We also propose a simple hybrid method that provides both compact storage, and also faster intersection computations for conjunctive querying than is possible even with uncompressed representations.

Full text

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1877766.1877767 .