V-Twin: A Lightweight Engine for Interactive Use

This paper describes V-Twin, an information access toolkit designed to provide indexing and search capabilities for a variety of applications. We discuss the phenomenon of very short queries generated by users of interactive search services, and summarize a new technique we are using in V-Twin to handle these queries more effectively. We then present some results based on V-Twin's performance at the TREC-5 ad hoc task. V-Twin achieved a high level of performance despite having much lower index overhead and memory footprint than other systems participating in TREC