Inverted files versus signature files for text indexing

• Published in: ACM transactions on database systems Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 453 - 490
• Main Authors: Zobel, Justin, Moffat, Alistair, Ramamohanarao, Kotagiri
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.12.1998; Association for Computing Machinery, Inc; Association for Computing Machinery
• Subjects: Applied computing; Computer programming; Contextual software domains; Data management systems; Data structures design and analysis; Database administration; Database design and models; Design and analysis of algorithms; Document management and text processing; Document preparation; File systems management; Indexing; Information retrieval; Information storage systems; Information systems; Operating systems; Physical data models; Record storage systems; Software and its engineering; Software organization and properties; Sorting and searching; Technology application; Text processing; Theory of computation; United States; signature files; text indexing; performance; inverted files; text databases; indexing
• ISSN: 0362-5915; 1557-4644; 1557-4644
• DOI: 10.1145/296854.277632

Two well-known indexing methods are inverted files and signature files. We have undertaken a detailed comparison of these two approaches in the context of text indexing, paying particular attention to query evaluation speed and space requirements. We have examined their relative performance using both experimentation and a refined approach to modeling of signature files, and demonstrate that inverted files are distinctly superior to signature files. Not only can inverted files be used to evaluate typical queries in less time than can signature files, but inverted files require less space and provide greater functionality. Our results also show that a synthetic text database can provide a realistic indication of the behavior of an actual text database. The tools used to generate the synthetic database have been made publicly available