Multiple query processing via logic function factoring

Catena M., Tonellotto N.

Information Retrieval 

Some extensions to search systems require support for multiple query processing. This is the case with query variations, i.e., different query formulations of the same information need. The results of their processing can be fused together to improve effectiveness, but this requires to traverse more than once the query terms' posting lists, thus prolonging the multiple query processing time. In this work, we propose an approach to optimize the processing of query variations to reduce their overall response time. Similarly to the standard Boolean model, we firstly represent a group of query variations as a logic function where Boolean variables represent query terms. We then apply factoring to such function, in order to produce a more compact but logically equivalent representation. The factored form is used to process the query variations in a single pass over the inverted index. We experimentally show that our approach can improve by up to 1.95× the mean processing time of a multiple query with no statistically significant degradation in terms of NDCG@10.

Source: 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 937–940, Parigi, Francia, 21-25 July, 2019

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