Supporting Interoperability Between Open-Source Search Engines with the Common Index File Format
Jimmy Lin, Joel Mackenzie, Chris Kamphuis, Craig Macdonald, Antonio Mallia, Michal Siedlaczek, Andrew Trotman, Arjen de Vries
SIGIR, 2020
Abstract: There exists a natural tension between encouraging a diverse ecosystem of open-source search engines and supporting fair, replicable comparisons across those systems. To balance these two goals, we examine two approaches to providing interoperability between the inverted indexes of several systems. The first takes advantage of internal abstractions around index structures and building wrappers that allow one system to directly read the indexes of another. The second involves sharing indexes across systems via a data exchange specification that we have developed, called the Common Index File Format (CIFF). We demonstrate the first approach with the Java systems Anserini and Terrier, and the second approach with Anserini, JASSv2, OldDog, PISA, and Terrier. Together, these systems provide a wide range of implementations and features, with different research goals. Overall, we recommend CIFF as a low-effort approach to support independent innovation while enabling the types of fair evaluations that are critical for driving the field forward.
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GPU-Accelerated Decoding of Integer Lists
Antonio Mallia, Michal Siedlaczek, Torsten Suel and Mohamed Zahran
CIKM, 2019
Abstract:
An inverted index is the basic data structure used in most current large-scale information retrieval systems. It can be modeled as a collection of sorted sequences of integers. Many compression techniques for inverted indexes have been studied in the past, with some of them reaching tremendous decompression speeds through the use of SIMD instructions available on modern CPUs. While there has been some work on query processing algorithms for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), little of it has focused on how to efficiently access compressed index structures, and we see some potential for significant improvements in decompression speed.
In this paper, we describe and implement two encoding schemes for index decompression on GPU architectures. Their format and decoding algorithm is adapted from existing CPU-based compression methods to exploit the execution model and memory hierarchy offered by GPUs. We show that our solutions, GPU-BP and GPU-VByte, achieve significant speedups over their already carefully optimized CPU counterparts.
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Forward Index Compression for Instance Retrieval in an Augmented Reality Application
Qi Wang, Michal Siedlaczek, Yen-Yu Chen, Michael Gormish, Torsten Suel
IEEE Big Data Conference, 2019
Abstract:
Instance retrieval systems are widely used in applications such as robot navigation, medical diagnosis, and augmented reality. Blippar is a company that creates compelling augmented reality experiences or provides you with the tools to build your own. In this paper we focus on one of the company’s augmented-reality applications, with which users are able to point their phone cameras at different objects in order to receive information about the objects in real time. In this paper, we provide what we believe to be the first study of forward index compression techniques for such instance retrieval systems. First, we perform an analysis of real-world data from a large-scale commercial instance retrieval system, run by Blippar focusing on augmented reality. Then we propose an entropy-based lossless compression strategy. Experiments show that our proposed Huffman-based approach outperforms a variety of other compression techniques, while also increasing overall system efficiency slightly.
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PISA: Performant Indexes and Search for Academia
Antonio Mallia, Michal Siedlaczek, Joel Mackenzie and Torsten Suel
Open-Source IR Replicability Challenge (OSIRRC) co-located with SIGIR, 2019
Abstract:
Performant Indexes and Search for Academia (PISA) is an experimental search engine that focuses on efficient implementations of state-of-the-art representations and algorithms for text retrieval. In this work, we outline our effort in creating a replicable search run from PISA for the 2019 Open Source Information Retrieval Replicability Challenge, which encourages the information retrieval community to produce replicable systems through the use of a containerized, Docker-based infrastructure. We also discuss the origins, current functionality, and future direction and challenges for the PISA system.
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An Experimental Study of Index Compression and DAAT Query Processing Methods
Antonio Mallia, Michal Siedlaczek and Torsten Suel
ECIR, 2019
Abstract:
In the last two decades, the IR community has seen numerous advances in top-k query processing and inverted index compression techniques. While newly proposed techniques are typically proposed against a few baselines, these evaluations are often very limited, and we feel that there is no clear overall picture on the best choices of algorithms and compression methods. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by evaluating a number of state-of-the-art index compression methods and safe disjunctive DAAT query processing algorithms. Our goal is to understand how much index compression performance impacts overall query processing speeds, how the choice of query processing algorithm depends on the compression method used, and how performance is impacted by document reordering techniques and the number of results returned, keeping in mind that current search engines typically use sets of hundreds or thousands of candidates for further reranking.
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