An extended inverted file approach for information retrieval

In information retrieval, the way in which the correspondence procedure works is highly important for the performance of the underlying system as a whole. An inverted file ensures quick access to the information items because the index alone is examined, rather than the actual file of items, in order to determine the items which satisfy a search request. This technique was a prominent feature of the old commercial information retrieval systems (IRSs). However it has been used only for keyword-based IRSs. Since that time, the inverted file design has not been radically modified. With the recent use of more expressive and richly structured languages in information retrieval, this method has not been used very much lately because it has been overrun by the expressiveness that new indexing languages, such as knowledge representation languages, have brought about. We propose to make use again of an extended version of the almost forgotten inverted file techniques, so that the complexity of our algorithms is polynomial. This allows us to implement, with a few modifications, a retrieval engine based on conceptual graphs on top of the O₂ object-oriented DBMS