Synonyms
Full text inverted index; Inverted index; Postings file
Definition
An Inverted file is an index data structure that maps content to its location within a database file, in a document or in a set of documents. It is normally composed of: (i) a vocabulary that contains all the distinct words found in a text and (ii), for each word t of the vocabulary, a list that contains statistics about the occurrences of t in the text. Such list is known as the inverted list of t. The inverted file is the most popular data structure used in document retrieval systems to support full text search.
Historical Background
Efforts for indexing electronic texts are found in literature since the beginning of the computational systems. For example, descriptions of Electronic Information Search Systems that are able to index and search text can be found in the early 1950s [1].
In a seminal work, Gerard Salton wrote a book in 1968, containing the basis for the modern information retrieval systems [2],...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Luhn HP. A statistical approach to mechanized encoding and searching of literary information. IBM J Res Dev. 1957;1(4):309–17.
Salton G. Automatic information organization and retrieval. New York: McGraw-Hill; 1968.
de Moura ES, dos Santos CF, Fernandes DR, Silva AS, Calado P, Nascimento MA. Improving web search efficiency via a locality based static pruning method. In: Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference; 2005. p. 235–44.
Baeza-Yates R, Ribeiro-Neto B. Modern information retrieval. 2nd ed. Reading: Addison Wesley; 2011.
Anh V, Moffat A. Pruned query evaluation using pre-computed impacts. In: Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2006. p. 372–9.
Anh V, Kretser O de, Moffat A. Vector-space ranking with effective early termination. In: Proceedings of the 24th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2001. p. 35–42.
Strohman T, Croft WB. Efficient document retrieval in main memory. In: Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2007. p. 175–82.
Ding S, Suel T. Faster top-k document retrieval using block-max in- dexes. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2011. p. 993–1002.
Rossi C, de Moura ES, Carvalho AL, da Silva AS. Fast document-at-a-time query processing using two-tier indexes. In: Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2013. p. 183–92.
Marcus F, Vanja J, Jinhui L, Srihari V, Xi-angfei Z, Zien Jason Y. Evaluation strategies for top-k queries over memory- resident inverted indexes. Proc VLDB Endow. 2011;4(12):1213–24.
Long X, Suel T. Three-level caching for efficient query processing in large Web search engines. Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference; 2005. p. 257–66.
Kaszkiel M, Zobel J. Term-ordered query evaluation versus document- ordered query evaluation for large document databases. Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1998. p. 343–4.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
De Moura, E.S., Cristo, M.A. (2018). Inverted Files. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1136
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1136
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering