International Business Machines Corporation

Silvio Wiedrich

Peter Altevogt

Marcus Felipe Fontoura

Jason Yeong Zien

Provided are techniques for computer-based electronic Information Retrieval (IR). An extended inverted index structure by generating one or more lexical affinities (LA), wherein each of the one or more lexical affinities comprises two or more search items found in proximity in one or more documents in a pool of documents, and generating a posting list for each of the one or more lexical affinities, wherein each posting list is associated with a specific lexical affinity and contains document identifying information for each of the one or more documents in the pool that contains the specific lexical affinity and a location within the document where the specific lexical affinity occurs.

Enhancing query performance of search engines using lexical affinities

A method of enhancing the decoding performance of text indexes of an indexed collection of text documents is disclosed. The posting list includes a plurality of list entries being of variable size depending on the value stored in each posting list entry. The inventive method is base on a statistical analysis of the posting list entries of the plurality of list entries. Prior to decoding, the method selects a decoding routine being appropriate to decode the most frequent type of posting list entries or of a plurality of various posting list entries. After selecting a particular decoding routine and executing the decoding routine for decoding of the entire posting list, a failure check is performed. In the exceptional case that a failure has occurred, a second alternative decoding procedure is selected and executed.

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London, United Kingdom

Silvio Wiedrich