A review of the use of inverted files for best match searching in information retrieval systems

Abstract

The use of inverted files for the calculation of similarity coefficients and other types of matching function is discussed in the context of mechanised document retrieval systems. A critical evaluation is presented of a range of algorithms which have been described for the matching of documents with queries. Particular attention is paid to the computational efficiency of the various procedures, and improved search heuristics are given in some cases. It is suggested that the algorithms could be implemented sufficiently efficiently to permit the provision of nearest neighbour searching as a standard retrieval option.