Compact Indexes for Flexible Top-k Retrieval

Abstract: We engineer a self-index based retrieval system capable of rank-safe evaluation of top-k queries. The framework generalizes the GREEDY approach of Culpepper et al. (ESA 2010) to handle multi-term queries, including over phrases. We propose two techniques which significantly reduce the ranking time for a wide range of popular Information Retrieval (IR) relevance measures, such as TFxIDF and BM25. First, we reorder elements in the document array according to document weight. Second, we introduce the repetition array, which generalizes Sadakane's (JDA 2007) document frequency structure to document subsets. Combining document and repetition array, we achieve attractive functionality-space trade-offs. We provide an extensive evaluation of our system on terabyte-sized IR collections.