Ginix： Generalized Inverted Index for Keyword Search

Keyword search has become a ubiquitous method for users to access text data in the face of information explosion. Inverted lists are usually used to index underlying documents to retrieve documents according to a set of keywords efficiently. Since inverted lists are usually large, many compression techniques have been proposed to reduce the storage space and disk I/O time. However, these techniques usually perform decompression operations on the fly, which increases the CPU time. This paper presents a more efficient index structure, the Generalized INverted IndeX （Ginix）, which merges consecutive IDs in inverted lists into intervals to save storage space. With this index structure, more efficient algorithms can be devised to perform basic keyword search operations, i.e., the union and the intersection operations, by taking the advantage of intervals. Specifically, these algorithms do not require conversions from interval lists back to ID lists. As a result, keyword search using Ginix can be more efficient than those using traditional inverted indices. The performance of Ginix is also improved by reordering the documents in datasets using two scalable algorithms. Experiments on the performance and scalability of Ginix on real datasets show that Ginix not only requires less storage space, but also improves the keyword search performance, compared with traditional inverted indexes.