Sigma encoded inverted files
Andrew Trotman, Vikram Subramanya · 2007
Compression of term frequency lists and very long document-id lists within an inverted file search engine are examined. Several compression schemes are compared including Elias γ and δ codes, Golomb Encoding, Variable Byte Encoding, and a class of word-based encoding schemes including Simple-9, Relative-10 and Carryover-12. It is shown that these compression methods are not well suited to compressing these kinds of lists of numbers. Of those tested, Carryover-12 is preferred because it is both effective at compression and fast at decompression.