CI-6226

Lecture 4. Index Construction &

Compressing
Information Retrieval and Analysis

Vasily Sidorov

1
Plan
• Last lecture:
—Dictionary data structures a-hu n-z
hy-m
—Tolerant retrieval
◦ Wildcards
◦ Spell correction
◦ Soundex $m mace madden

mo among amortize

• Today: on abandon among

—Index construction

2
 Let’s Recall

Term TermID
friend 1
roman 2
countryman 3
Can also be positional
lend 4
i 5 TermID Freq. Postings List (DocIDs)
you 6 → 1 → 5 → 6 → 12
1 4
ear 7
5 2 → 1 → 8
Dictionary 7 6 → 1 → 2 → 6 → 8 → 12 → 13

Inverted Index

3
 Ch. 4

Index construction
• How do we construct an index?

• What strategies can we use with limited main

memory?

4
 Sec. 4.1

Hardware basics
• Many design decisions in information retrieval are
based on the characteristics of hardware

• We begin by reviewing hardware basics

5
Hardware basics

6
 Sec. 4.1

Hardware basics
• Access to data in memory (RAM) is much faster
than access to data on disk.
• Disk seeks: No data is transferred from disk while
the disk head is being positioned.
• Therefore: Transferring one large chunk of data
from disk to memory is faster than transferring
many small chunks.
• Disk I/O is block-based: Reading and writing of
entire blocks (as opposed to smaller chunks).
• Block sizes: 8KB to 256 KB.

7
Hardware basics
• Solid State Drives (SSD) are mitigating some of the
problems:
—~100 times faster access time than HDDs
—1-2 order of magnitude faster I/O than HDDs
—Possesses a property of Random Access — (almost)
no “disk seek” delay
• Still much slower than RAM
• Still reads/writes in blocks
• Still too expensive compared to HDD

8
 Sec. 4.1

Hardware basics
• Servers used in IR systems now typically have
dozens GB of main memory, sometimes hundreds of
GB.

• Available disk space is several (2–3) orders of

magnitude larger. 64 GB of RAM → 5-10 TB of disk

• Fault tolerance is very expensive: It’s much cheaper

to use many regular machines rather than one fault
tolerant machine.

9
 Sec. 4.1

Hardware assumptions for this

lecture
symbol statistic value
s average seek time 5 ms = 5 x 10−3 s
b transfer time per byte 0.02 μs = 2 x 10−8 s
processor’s clock rate 109 s−1
p low-level operation 0.01 μs = 10−8 s
(e.g., compare & swap a word)
size of main memory several GB
size of disk space 1 TB or more

10
 Sec. 4.2

RCV1: Our collection for this lecture

• Shakespeare’s collected works definitely aren’t large
enough for demonstrating many of the points in
this course.
• The collection we’ll use isn’t really large enough
either, but it’s publicly available and is at least a
more plausible example.
• As an example for applying scalable index
construction algorithms, we will use the Reuters
RCV1 collection.
• This is one year of Reuters newswire (part of 1995
and 1996)
11
 Sec. 4.2

A Reuters RCV1 document

12
 Sec. 4.2

Reuters RCV1 statistics

symbol statistic value
N documents 800,000
L avg. # tokens per doc 200
M terms (= word types) 400,000
avg. # bytes per token 6
(incl. spaces/punct.)
avg. # bytes per token 4.5
(without spaces/punct.)
avg. # bytes per term 7.5
non-positional postings 100,000,000

4.5 bytes per token vs. 7.5 bytes per term: why? 13
 Sec. 4.2

Recall IIR 1 index construction Term

I
Doc #
1
did 1
enact 1
julius 1

• Documents are parsed to extract words and these caesar

I
1
1
are saved with the Document ID. was 1
killed 1
i' 1
the 1
capitol 1
brutus 1
killed 1
me 1
Doc 1 Doc 2 so 2
let 2
it 2
be 2
I did enact Julius So let it be with with 2

Caesar I was killed Caesar. The noble

caesar
the
2
2
i' the Capitol; Brutus hath told you noble
brutus
2
2
Brutus killed me. Caesar was ambitious hath 2
told 2
you 2
caesar 2
was 14 2
ambitious 2
 Sec. 4.2

Key step Term

I
Doc #
1
Term
ambitious
Doc #
2
did 1 be 2
enact 1 brutus 1
julius 1 brutus 2
• After all documents have been caesar
I
1
1
capitol
caesar
1
1
parsed, the inverted file is sorted was 1 caesar 2
caesar 2
by terms. killed
i'
1
1 did 1
the 1 enact 1
capitol 1 hath 1
brutus 1 I 1
killed 1 I 1

We focus on this sort step. me

so
1
2
i'
it
1
2

We have 100M items to sort. let

it
2
2
julius
killed
1
1
be 2 killed 1
with 2 let 2
caesar 2 me 1
the 2 noble 2
noble 2 so 2
brutus 2 the 1
hath 2 the 2
told 2 told 2
you 2 you 2
caesar 2 was 1
was 2 was 2
ambitious 2 with 2
15
 Sec. 4.2

Scaling index construction

• In-memory index construction does not scale
—Can’t stuff entire collection into memory, sort, then
write back
• How can we construct an index for very large
collections?
• Taking into account the hardware constraints we
just learned about . . .
• Memory, disk, speed, etc.

16
 Sec. 4.2

Sort-based index construction

• As we build the index, we parse docs one at a time.
—While building the index, we cannot easily exploit
compression tricks (you can, but much more complex)
• The final postings for any term are incomplete until the end.
• At 12 bytes per non-positional postings entry (term, doc,
freq), demands a lot of space for large collections.
• T = 100,000,000 in the case of RCV1
—So… we can do this in memory in 2019, but typical
collections are much larger. E.g., the New York Times
provides an index of >150 years of newswire
• Thus: We need to store intermediate results on disk.

17
 Sec. 4.2

Sort using disk as “memory”?

• Can we use the same index construction algorithm
for larger collections, but by using disk instead of
memory?
• No: Sorting T = 100,000,000 records on disk is too
slow – too many disk seeks.
• We need an external sorting algorithm.

18
 Sec. 4.2

Bottleneck
• Parse and build postings entries one doc at a time
• Now sort postings entries by term (then by doc
within each term)
• Doing this with random disk seeks would be too
slow – must sort T=100M records

If every comparison took 2 disk seeks, and N items could be

sorted with N log2N comparisons, how long would this take?

19
 Sec. 4.2

BSBI: Blocked Sort-Based Indexing

(sorting with fewer disk seeks)
• 12-byte (4+4+4) records (term, doc, freq)
• These are generated as we parse docs
• Must now sort 100M such 12-byte records by term.
• Define a Block ~ 10M such records
—Can easily fit a couple into memory.
—Will have 10 such blocks to start with.
• Basic idea of algorithm:
—Accumulate postings for each block, sort, write to
disk.
—Then merge the blocks into one long sorted order.

20
21
 Sec. 4.2

Sorting 10 blocks of 10M records

▪First, read each block and sort within:
▪Quicksort takes 2N ln N expected steps
▪In our case 2 x (10M ln 10M) steps
▪Exercise: estimate total time to read each block
from disk and quicksort it.
▪10 times this estimate – gives us 10 sorted runs of
10M records each.
▪Done straightforwardly, need 2 copies of data on
disk
▪But can optimize this

22
Sec. 4.2

23
 Sec. 4.2

How to merge the sorted runs?

• Can do binary merges, with a merge tree of log210 = 4 layers.
• During each layer, read into memory runs in blocks of 10M,
merge, write back.

1
1 2
2 Merged run.
3 4
3

4
Runs being
merged.
Disk
24
 Sec. 4.2

How to merge the sorted runs?

• But it is more efficient to do a multi-way merge, where you
are reading from all blocks simultaneously
• Providing you read decent-sized chunks of each block into
memory and then write out a decent-sized output chunk,
then you’re not killed by disk seeks

25
 Sec. 4.3

Remaining problem with sort-based

algorithm
• Our assumption was: we can keep the dictionary in
memory.
• We need the dictionary (which grows dynamically)
in order to implement a term to termID mapping.
• Actually, we could work with term,docID postings
instead of termID,docID postings . . .
• . . . but then intermediate files become very large.
(We would end up with a scalable, but very slow
index construction method.)

26
 Sec. 4.3

SPIMI:
Single-Pass In-Memory Indexing
• Key idea 1: Generate separate dictionaries for each
block – no need to maintain term-termID mapping
across blocks.
• Key idea 2: Don’t sort. Accumulate postings in
postings lists as they occur.
• With these two ideas we can generate a complete
inverted index for each block.
• These separate indexes can then be merged into
one big index.

27
 Sec. 4.3

SPIMI-Invert

Merging of blocks is analogous to BSBI. 28

 Sec. 4.3

SPIMI: Compression
• Compression makes SPIMI even more efficient.
—Compression of terms
—Compression of postings
• We’ll discuss later today

29
 Sec. 4.4

Distributed indexing
• For web-scale indexing (don’t try this at home!):
must use a distributed computing cluster

• Individual machines are fault-prone

—Can unpredictably slow down or fail

• How do we exploit such a pool of machines?

30
 Sec. 4.4

Web search engine data centers

• Web search data centers (Google, Bing, Baidu)
mainly contain commodity machines.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/112891/article.html

• Data centers are distributed around the world

—15 locations in the world
◦ There’s one in Jurong West Avenue 2

• Estimate: Google uses ~900K servers (2011 report)

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/01/report-google-
uses-about-900000-servers

31
Google Data Center in Jurong West

32
 Sec. 4.4

Massive data centers

• If in a non-fault-tolerant system with 1000 nodes,
each node has 99.9% uptime, what is the uptime of
the system?
• Answer: 63%
• Exercise: Calculate the number of servers failing per
minute for an installation of 1 million servers.
• Colloquially, SLA is counted in “nines”, e.g., an SLA
of two “nines”: 99.99% uptime.

33
 Sec. 4.4

Distributed indexing
• Maintain a master machine directing the indexing
job – considered “safe”.
• Break up indexing into sets of (parallel) tasks.
• Master machine assigns each task to an idle
machine from a pool.

34
 Sec. 4.4

Parallel tasks
• We will use two sets of parallel tasks
—Parsers
—Inverters
• Break the input document collection into splits
• Each split is a subset of documents (corresponding
to blocks in BSBI/SPIMI)

35
 Sec. 4.4

Parsers
• Master assigns a split to an idle parser machine
• Parser reads one document at a time and emits
(term, doc) pairs
• Parser writes pairs into j partitions
• Each partition is for a range of terms’ first letters
—(e.g., a-f, g-p, q-z) – here j = 3.
• Now to complete the index inversion

36
 Sec. 4.4

Inverters
• An inverter collects all (term,doc) pairs (= postings)
for one term-partition.
• Sorts and writes to postings lists

37
 Sec. 4.4

Data flow

assign Master assign

Postings

Parser a-f g-p q-z Inverter a-f

Parser a-f g-p q-z

Inverter g-p

splits Inverter q-z

Parser a-f g-p q-z

Map Reduce
Segment files
phase phase 38
 Sec. 4.4

MapReduce
• The index construction algorithm we just described
is an instance of MapReduce.
• MapReduce (Dean & Ghemawat 2004) is a robust
and conceptually simple framework for distributed
computing …
• … without having to write code for the distribution
part.
• They describe the Google indexing system (ca.
2002) as consisting of a number of phases, each
implemented in MapReduce.

39
 Sec. 4.4

MapReduce
• Index construction was just one phase.
• Another phase: transforming a term-partitioned
index into a document-partitioned index.
—Term-partitioned: one machine handles a subrange
of terms
—Document-partitioned: one machine handles a
subrange of documents
• As we’ll discuss in the web part of the course, most
search engines use a document-partitioned index
for better load balancing, etc.

40
 Sec. 4.4

Schema for index construction in

MapReduce
MapReduce breaks a large problem into smaller parts using
—Key-value pairs (k, v)
Schema of map and reduce functions
—map: input → list(k, v)
—reduce: (k, list(v)) → output
Instantiation of the schema for index construction
—Map (parser): collection → list(termID, docID)
—Reduce (inverter):
(<termID1, list(docID)>, <termID2, list(docID)>, …) →
(postings list1, postings list2, …)

41
 Example for index construction
Map:
—d1 : C came, C c’ed.
—d2 : C died.
—→ <C,d1>, <came,d1>, <C,d1>, <c’ed, d1>, <C, d2>,
<died,d2>
Reduce:
—(<C,(d1,d2,d1)>, <died,(d2)>, <came,(d1)>, <c’ed,(d1)>)
—→ (<C,(d1:2,d2:1)>, <died,(d2:1)>, <came,(d1:1)>,
<c’ed,(d1:1)>)

42
 Sec. 4.5

Dynamic indexing
• Up to now, we have assumed that collections are
static.
• They rarely are:
—Documents come in over time and need to be
inserted.
—Documents are deleted and modified.
• This means that the dictionary and postings lists
have to be modified:
—Postings updates for terms already in dictionary
—New terms added to dictionary
◦ #ValentinesDay

43
 Sec. 4.5

Simplest approach
• Maintain “big” main index
• New docs go into “small” auxiliary index
• Search across both, merge results
• Deletions
—Invalidation bit-vector for deleted docs
—Filter docs output on a search result by this
invalidation bit-vector
• Periodically, re-index into one main index

44
 Sec. 4.5

Issues with main and auxiliary

indexes
• Problem of frequent merges – you touch stuff a lot
• Poor performance during merge
• Actually:
—Merging of the auxiliary index into the main index is efficient if we
keep a separate file for each postings list
—Merge is the same as a simple append
—But then we would need a lot of files – inefficient for file system
• Assumption for the rest of the lecture:
The index is one big file.
• In reality:
—Use a scheme somewhere in between (e.g., split very large
postings lists, collect postings lists of length 1 in one file etc.)

45
 Sec. 4.5

Logarithmic merge
• Maintain a series of indexes, each twice as large as
the previous one
—At any time, some of these powers of 2 are
instantiated
—Keep smallest (Z0) in memory
—Larger ones (I0, I1, …) on disk
• If Z0 gets too big (> n), write to disk as I0, or merge
with I0 (if I0 already exists) as Z1
• Either write merge Z1 to disk as I1 (if no I1), or merge
with I1 to form Z2
• etc…
46
Sec. 4.5

47
 Sec. 4.5

Logarithmic merge complexity

• Notation:
◦ T — total number of postings
◦ n – size of auxiliary index
• Auxiliary and main index:
◦ Each posting is touched in each merge
◦ Overall index construction time is O(T2/n)
• Logarithmic merge:
◦ Each posting is merged O(log T) times
◦ Overall complexity is O(T log T)
• So, logarithmic merge is much more efficient for index construction
• But query processing now requires the merging of O(log T) indexes
—Whereas it is O(1) if you just have a main and auxiliary index

48
 Sec. 4.5

Further issues with multiple indexes

• Collection-wide statistics are hard to maintain
—E.g., when we spoke of spell-correction: which of
several corrected alternatives do we present to the
user?
—We said, pick the one with the most hits
• How do we maintain the top ones with multiple
indexes and invalidation bit vectors?
—One possibility: ignore everything but the main
index for such ordering
• Will see more such statistics used in results ranking

49
 Sec. 4.5

Dynamic indexing at search engines

• All the large search engines now do dynamic
indexing
• Their indices have frequent incremental changes
—News, blogs, twitter, new topical web pages
• But (sometimes/typically) they also periodically
reconstruct the index from scratch
—Query processing is then switched to the new index,
and the old index is deleted

50
 Sec. 4.5

Other sorts of indexes

• Positional indexes
—Same type of sorting problem … just larger Why?
• Building character n-gram indexes:
—As text is parsed, enumerate n-grams.
—For each n-gram, need pointers to all dictionary terms
containing it – the “postings”.
—Note that the same “postings entry” will arise repeatedly
in parsing the docs – need efficient hashing to keep track
of this.
◦ E.g., the fact that trigram uou occurs in the term deciduous
will be discovered on each text occurrence of deciduous
◦ Only need to process each term once
51
 Ch. 5

Next up

• Collection statistics in more detail (with RCV1)

—How big will the dictionary and postings be?
• Dictionary compression
• Postings compression

52
 Ch. 5

Why compression (in general)?

• Use less disk space
—Saves a little money
• Keep more stuff in memory
—Increases speed
• Increase speed of data transfer from disk to
memory
—[read compressed data | decompress] is faster than
[read uncompressed data]
—Premise: Decompression algorithms are fast
◦ True for the decompression algorithms we use

53
 Ch. 5

Why compression for inverted indexes?

• Dictionary
—Make it small enough to keep in main memory
—Make it so small that you can keep some postings
lists in main memory too
• Postings file(s)
—Reduce disk space needed
—Decrease time needed to read postings lists from
disk
—Large search engines keep a significant part of the
postings in memory.
◦ Compression lets you keep more in memory
• We will devise various IR-specific compression schemes
54
 Sec. 4.2

Recall Reuters RCV1 Statistics

symbol statistic value
N documents 800,000
L avg. # tokens per doc 200
M terms (= word types) 400,000
avg. # bytes per token 6
(incl. spaces/punct.)
avg. # bytes per token 4.5
(without spaces/punct.)
avg. # bytes per term 7.5
non-positional postings 100,000,000

55
 Sec. 5.1

Index parameters vs. what we index

(details IIR Table 5.1, p.80)

size of word types (terms) non-positional positional postings

postings
dictionary non-positional index positional index
Size (K) ∆% cumul% Size (K) ∆% cumul% Size (K) ∆% cumul%
Unfiltered 484 109,971 197,879
No numbers 474 -2 -2 100,680 -8 -8 179,158 -9 -9
Case folding 392 -17 -19 96,969 -3 -12 179,158 0 -9
30 stopwords 391 -0 -19 83,390 -14 -24 121,858 -31 -38
150 stopwords 391 -0 -19 67,002 -30 -39 94,517 -47 -52
stemming 322 -17 -33 63,812 -4 -42 94,517 0 -52

Exercise: give intuitions for all the ‘0’ entries. Why do some zero entries
correspond to big deltas in other columns?
56
 Sec. 5.1

Lossless vs. lossy compression

• Lossless compression: All information is preserved.
—What we mostly do in IR.
• Lossy compression: Discard some information
—Several of the preprocessing steps can be viewed as
lossy compression:
◦ case folding, stop words, stemming, number
elimination.
—Chapter 7: Prune postings entries that are unlikely to
turn up in the top k list for any query.
◦ Almost no loss quality for top k list.

57
 Sec. 5.1

Vocabulary vs. collection size

• How big is the term vocabulary?
—That is, how many distinct words are there?
• Can we assume an upper bound?
—Not really… 26 letters, 20 positions: 2620 ≈ 294
possible variations
◦ Will require ~3x1014 petabytes
—In practice, the vocabulary will keep growing with
the collection size
—Especially with Unicode ☺

58
 Sec. 5.1

Vocabulary vs. collection size

• Heaps’ law: M = kTb
—M is the size of the vocabulary,
—T is the number of tokens in the collection
—Typical values: 30 ≤ k ≤ 100 and b ≈ 0.5
• In a log-log plot of vocabulary size M vs. T, Heaps’
law predicts a line with slope about ½
—It is the simplest possible relationship between the
two in log-log space
—An empirical finding (“empirical law”)

59
 Sec. 5.1

Heaps’ Law M = kTb

For RCV1, the dashed line
log10M = 0.49 log10T + 1.64
is the best least squares fit.

Thus, M = 101.64T0.49 so
k = 101.64 ≈ 44 and b = 0.49.

Good empirical fit for

Reuters RCV1 !

For first 1,000,020 tokens,

law predicts 38,323 terms;
actually, 38,365 terms!

60
 Sec. 5.1

Exercises
• What is the effect of including spelling errors, vs.
automatically correcting spelling errors on Heaps’
law?
• Compute the vocabulary size M for this scenario:
—Looking at a collection of web pages, you find that
there are 3000 different terms in the first 10,000
tokens and 30,000 different terms in the first
1,000,000 tokens.
—Assume a search engine indexes a total of
20,000,000,000 (2 × 1010) pages, containing 200
tokens on average
—What is the size of the vocabulary of the indexed
collection as predicted by Heaps’ law? 61
 Sec. 5.1

Zipf’s law

• Heaps’ law gives the vocabulary size in collections.

• We also study the relative frequencies of terms.
• In natural language, there are
—a few very frequent terms, and
—A lot of very rare terms
• Zipf’s law: The ith most frequent term has frequency
proportional to 1/i .
—cfi ∝ 1/i = K/i where K is a normalizing constant
—cfi is collection frequency: the number of occurrences
of the term ti in the collection.

62
 Sec. 5.1

Zipf consequences
• If the most frequent term (the) occurs cf1 times
—then the second most frequent term (of) occurs
cf1/2 times
—the third most frequent term (and) occurs cf1/3
times …
• Equivalent: cfi = K/i where K is a normalizing factor,
so
—log cfi = log K - log i
—Linear relationship between log cfi and log i

—Another power law relationship

63
 Sec. 5.1

Zipf’s law for Reuters RCV1

64
 Ch. 5

Compression
•Now, we will consider compressing the space
for the dictionary and postings
—Basic Boolean index only
—Not considering positional indexes, etc.
—We will consider compression schemes

65
 Sec. 5.2

Why compress the dictionary?

• Search begins with the dictionary
• We want to keep it in memory
• Memory footprint competition with other
applications
• Embedded/mobile devices may have very little
memory
• Even if the dictionary isn’t in memory, we want it to
be small for a fast search startup time

So, compressing the dictionary is important

66
 Sec. 5.2

Dictionary storage - first cut

• Array of fixed-width entries
—~400,000 terms; 28 bytes/term = 11.2 MB.

Terms Freq. Postings ptr.

a 656,265
aachen 65
…. ….
zulu 221

Dictionary search 20 bytes 4 bytes each

structure Assuming, that almost no English words are longer than 20 characters

67
 Sec. 5.2

Fixed-width terms are wasteful

• Most of the bytes in the Term column are wasted –
we allocate 20 bytes for 1 letter terms.
—And we still can’t handle supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or
hydrochlorofluorocarbons
• Written English averages ~4.5 characters/word.
—Exercise: Why is/isn’t this the number to use for
estimating the dictionary size?
• Ave. dictionary word in English: ~8 characters
—How do we use ~8 characters per dictionary term?
• Short words dominate token counts but not type
average.

68
 Sec. 5.2

Compressing the term list:

Dictionary-as-a-String
◼ Store dictionary as a (long) string of characters:
◼ Pointer to next word shows end of current word
◼ Hope to save up to 60% of dictionary space.
….systilesyzygeticsyzygialsyzygyszaibelyiteszczecinszomo….

Freq. Postings ptr. Term ptr.

Total string length =
33
400K x 8B = 3.2MB
29
44
Pointers resolve 3.2M
126
positions: log23.2M =
22bits = 3bytes

69
 Sec. 5.2

Space for dictionary as a string

• 4 bytes per term for Freq.
• 4 bytes per term for pointer to Postings.  Now avg. 11
 bytes/term,
• 3 bytes per term pointer  not 20.
• Avg. 8 bytes per term in term string
• 400K terms x 19  7.6 MB (against 11.2MB for
fixed width)

70
 Sec. 5.2

Blocking
• Store pointers to every kth term string.
—Example below: k=4.
• Need to store term lengths (1 extra byte)
….7systile9syzygetic8syzygial6syzygy11szaibelyite8szczecin9szomo….

Freq. Postings ptr. Term ptr.

33
29
 Save 9 bytes Lose 4 bytes on
44  on 3 term lengths.
126  pointers.
7

71
 Sec. 5.2

Net savings
• Example for block size k = 4
• Where we used 3 bytes/pointer without blocking
—3 x 4 = 12 bytes,
now we use 3 + 4 = 7 bytes.
Shaved another ~0.5MB. This reduces the size of the
dictionary from 7.6 MB to 7.1 MB.
• We can save more with larger k
• Will cause slower term lookup
Exercise: Why is it slower? Estimate the performance impact of k
Exercise: Estimate the space usage (and savings compared to
7.6 MB) with blocking, for block sizes of k = 4, 8 and 16.
72
 Sec. 5.2

Front coding
• Front-coding:
—Sorted words commonly have a long common prefix
– store differences only
—(for last k-1 in a block of k)
8automata8automate9automatic10automation

→8automat*a1e2ic3ion

Encodes automat Extra length

beyond automat.
Begins to resemble general string compression. 73
 Sec. 5.2

RCV1 dictionary compression summary

Technique Size in MB

Fixed width 11.2

Dictionary-as-String with pointers to every term 7.6

Also, blocking k = 4 7.1

Also, Blocking + front coding 5.9

74
 Sec. 5.3

Postings compression
• The postings file is much larger than the dictionary,
factor of at least 10
• Key goal: store each posting compactly.
• A posting for our purposes is a docID.
—For Reuters (800,000 documents), we would use 32
bits per docID when using 4-byte integers.
—Alternatively, we can use log2 800,000 ≈ 20 bits per
docID.
• Our goal: use far fewer than 20 bits per docID.

75
 Sec. 5.3

Postings: two conflicting forces

• A term like arachnocentric occurs in maybe one doc
out of a million
—we would like to store this posting using
log2 1M ≈ 20 bits.
• A term like the occurs in virtually every doc, so 20
bits/posting is too expensive.
—Prefer 0/1 bitmap vector in this case

76
 Sec. 5.3

Postings file entry

• We store the list of docs containing a term in
increasing order of docID.
—computer: 33,47,154,159,202 …
• Consequence: it suffices to store gaps.
—33,14,107,5,43 …
• Hope: most gaps can be encoded/stored with far
fewer than 20 bits.

77
 Sec. 5.3

Three postings entries

78
 Sec. 5.3

Variable length encoding

• Aim:
—For arachnocentric, we will use ~20 bits/gap entry.
—For the, we will use ~1 bit/gap entry.
• If the average gap for a term is G, we want to use
~log2G bits/gap entry.
• Key challenge: encode every integer (gap) with
about as few bits as needed for that integer.
• This requires a variable length encoding
• Variable length codes achieve this by using short
codes for small numbers

79
 Sec. 5.3

Variable Byte (VB) codes

• For a gap value G, we want to use close to the
fewest bytes needed to hold log2 G bits
• Begin with one byte to store G and dedicate 1 bit in
it to be a continuation bit c
—If G ≤127, binary-encode it in the 7 available bits and
set c =1
—Else encode G’s lower-order 7 bits and then use
additional bytes to encode the higher order bits using
the same algorithm
—At the end set the continuation bit of the last byte
to 1 (c =1) – and for the other bytes c = 0.

80
 Sec. 5.3

Example
docIDs 824 829 215406
gaps 5 214577
VB code 00000110 10000101 00001101
10111000 00001100
10110001

Postings stored as the byte concatenation

000001101011100010000101000011010000110010110001

Key property: VB-encoded postings are

uniquely prefix-decodable.

For a small gap (5), VB

uses a whole byte. 81
 Sec. 5.3

Other variable unit codes

• Instead of bytes, we can also use a different “unit of
alignment”: 32 bits (words), 16 bits, 4 bits (nibbles).
• Variable byte alignment wastes space if you have
many small gaps – nibbles do better in such cases.
• Variable byte codes:
—Used by many commercial/research systems
—Good low-tech blend of variable-length coding and
sensitivity to computer memory alignment matches
(vs. bit-level codes, which we look at next).
• There is also recent work on word-aligned codes
that pack a variable number of gaps into one word
82
Unary code
• Represent n as n 1s with a final 0.
• Unary code for 3 is 1110.
• Unary code for 40 is
11111111111111111111111111111111111111110 .
• Unary code for 80 is:
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111110

• This doesn’t look promising, but….

83
 Sec. 5.3

Gamma codes
• We can compress better with bit-level codes
—The Gamma code is the best known of these.
• Represent a gap G as a pair length and offset
• offset is G in binary, with the leading bit cut off
—For example 13 → 1101 → 101
• length is the length of offset
—For 13 (offset 101), this is 3.
• We encode length with unary code: 1110.
• Gamma code of 13 is the concatenation of length
and offset: 1110101
84
 Sec. 5.3

Gamma code examples

number length offset g-code
0 none
1 0 0
2 10 0 10,0
3 10 1 10,1
4 110 00 110,00
9 1110 001 1110,001
13 1110 101 1110,101
24 11110 1000 11110,1000
511 111111110 11111111 111111110,11111111
1025 11111111110 0000000001 11111111110,0000000001

85
 Sec. 5.3

Gamma code properties

• G is encoded using 2 log G + 1 bits
—Length of offset is log G bits
—Length of length is log G + 1 bits
• All gamma codes have an odd number of bits
• Almost within a factor of 2 of best possible, log2 G

• Gamma code is uniquely prefix-decodable, like VB

• Gamma code can be used for any distribution
• Gamma code is parameter-free

86
 Sec. 5.3

Gamma seldom used in practice

• Machines have word boundaries – 8, 16, 32, 64 bits
—Operations that cross word boundaries are slower
• Compressing and manipulating at the granularity of
bits can be slow
• Variable byte encoding is aligned and thus
potentially more efficient
• Regardless of efficiency, variable byte is
conceptually simpler at little additional space cost

87
 Sec. 5.3

RCV1 compression
Data structure Size in MB
dictionary, fixed-width 11.2
dictionary, term pointers into string 7.6
with blocking, k = 4 7.1
with blocking & front coding 5.9
collection (text, xml markup etc) 3,600.0
collection (text) 960.0
Term-doc incidence matrix 40,000.0
postings, uncompressed (32-bit words) 400.0
postings, uncompressed (20 bits) 250.0
postings, variable byte encoded 116.0
postings, g-encoded 101.0

88
 Sec. 5.3

Index compression summary

• We can now create an index for highly efficient
Boolean retrieval that is very space efficient
• Only 4% of the total size of the collection
• Only 10-15% of the total size of the text in the
collection
• However, we’ve ignored positional information
• Hence, space savings are less for indexes used in
practice
—But techniques substantially the same.

89
 Ch. 4

Resources for today’s lecture

• Chapters 4, 5 of IIR
• Original publication on MapReduce: Dean &
Ghemawat (2004)
• Original publication on SPIMI: Heinz and Zobel (2003)
• F. Scholer, H.E. Williams and J. Zobel. 2002.
Compression of Inverted Indexes For Fast Query
Evaluation. Proc. ACM-SIGIR 2002.
—Variable byte codes
• V. N. Anh and A. Moffat. 2005. Inverted Index
Compression Using Word-Aligned Binary Codes.
Information Retrieval 8: 151–166.
—Word aligned codes 90