Multidimensional term indexing for efficient processing of complex queries

Abstract

The area of Information Retrieval deals with problems of storage and retrieval within a huge collection of text documents. In IR models, the semantics of a document is usually characterized using a set of terms. A common need to various IR models is an efficient term retrieval provided via a term index. Existing approaches of term indexing, e. g. the inverted list, support efficiently only simple queries asking for a term occurrence. In practice, we would like to exploit some more sophisticated querying mechanisms, in particular queries based on regular expressions. In this article we propose a multidimensional approach of term indexing providing efficient term retrieval and supporting regular expression queries. Since the term lengths are usually different, we also introduce an improvement based on a new data structure, called BUB-forest, providing even more efficient term retrieval.