Pruning strategies for mixed-mode querying
Vo Ngoc Anh, Alistair Moffat · 2006
Web information retrieval systems face a range of unique challenges, not the least of which is the sheer scale of the data that must be handled. Also specific to web retrieval is that queries may be a mix of Boolean and ranked features, and documents may have static score components that must also be factored into the ranking process. In this paper we consider a range of query semantics used in web retrieval systems, and show that impact-sorted indexes provide support for dynamic pruning mechanisms and in doing so allow fast document-at-a-time resolution of typical mixed-mode queries, even on relatively large volumes of data. Our techniques also extend to more complex query semantics, including the use of phrase, proximity, and structural constraints.