Incremental Updates of Inverted Lists for Text Document Retrieval

With the proliferation of the world's ``information highways'' a renewed interest in efficient document indexing techniques has come about. In this paper, the problem of incremental updates of inverted lists is addressed using a new dual-structure index data structure. The index dynamically separates long and short inverted lists and optimizes the retrieval, update, and storage of each type of list. To study the behavior of the index, a space of engineering trade-offs which range from optimizing update time to optimizing query performance is described. We quantitatively explore this space by using actual data and hardware in combination with a simulation of an information retrieval system. We then describe the best algorithm for a variety of criteria.