Top-k Term-Proximity in Succinct Space

Abstract

Abstract. Let D = {T1, T2, . . . , TD} be a collection of D string documents of n characters in total, that are drawn from an alphabet set Σ = [σ]. The top-k document retrieval problem is to preprocess D into a data structure that, given a query (P [1..p], k), can return the k documents of D most relevant to pattern P . The relevance is captured using a predefined ranking function, which depends on the set of occurrences of P in T d . For example, it can be the term frequency (i.e., the number of occurrences of P in T d ), or it can be the term proximity (i.e., the distance between the closest pair of occurrences of P in T d ), or a patternindependent importance score of T d such as PageRank. Linear space and optimal query time solutions already exist for this problem. Compressed and compact space solutions are also known, but only for a few ranking functions such as term frequency and importance. However, space efficient data structures for term proximity based retrieval have been evasive. In this paper we present the first sub-linear space data structure for this relevance function, which uses only o(n) bits on top of any compressed suffix array of D and solves queries in time O((p + k) polylog n).