Score-safe term-dependency processing with hybrid indexes

Score-safe index processing has received a great deal of attention over the last two decades. By pre-calculating maximum term impacts during indexing, the number of scoring operations can be minimized, and the top-k documents for a query can be located efficiently. However, these methods often ignore the importance of the effectiveness gains possible when using sequential dependency models. We present a hybrid approach which leverages score-safe processing and suffix-based self-indexing structures in order to provide efficient and effective top-k document retrieval.