Fast on-line index construction by geometric partitioning

Abstract

Inverted index structures are the mainstay of modern text retrieval systems. They can be constructed quickly using off-line mergebased methods, and provide efficient support for a variety of querying modes. In this paper we examine the task of on-line index construction - that is, how to build an inverted index when the underlying data must be continuously queryable, and the documents must be indexed and available for search as soon they are inserted. When straightforward approaches are used, document insertions become increasingly expensive as the size of the database grows. This paper describes a mechanism based on controlled partitioning that can be adapted to suit different balances of i..