Phrase Query Optimization on Inverted Indexes

Phrase queries are a key functionality of modern search engines. Beyond that, they increasingly serve as an important building block for applications such as entity-oriented search, text analytics, and plagiarism detection. Processing phrase queries is costly, though, since positional information has to be kept in the index and all words, including stopwords, need to be considered. We consider an augmented inverted index that indexes selected variable-length multi-word sequences in addition to single words. We study how arbitrary phrase queries can be processed efficiently on such an augmented inverted index. We show that the underlying optimization problem is NP-hard in the general case and describe an exact exponential algorithm and an approximation algorithm to its solution. Experiments on ClueWeb09 and The New York Times with different real-world query workloads examine the practical performance of our methods.