Efficient online index construction for text databases

Abstract

Inverted index structures are a core element of current text retrieval systems. They can be constructed quickly using offline approaches, in which one or more passes are made over a static set of input data, and, at the completion of the process, an index is available for querying. However, there are search environments in which even a small delay in timeliness cannot be tolerated, and the index must always be queryable and up to date. Here we describe and analyze a geometric partitioning mechanism for online index construction that provides a range of tradeoffs between costs, and can be adapted to different balances of insertion and querying operations. Detailed experimental results are pro..