Forbidden Extension Queries

Abstract

Document retrieval is one of the most fundamental problem in information retrieval. The objective is to retrieve all documents from a document collection that are relevant to an input pattern. 
Several variations of this problem such as ranked document retrieval, document listing with two patterns and forbidden patterns have been studied. We introduce the problem of document retrieval with forbidden extensions.

Let D={T_1,T_2,...,T_D} be a collection of D string documents of n characters in total, and P^+ and P^- be two query patterns, where P^+ is a proper prefix of P^-. We call P^- as the forbidden extension of the included pattern P^+. A forbidden extension query < P^+,P^- > asks to report all occ documents in D that contains P^+ as a substring, but does not contain P^- as one. A top-k forbidden extension query < P^+,P^-,k > asks to report those k documents among the occ documents that are most relevant to P^+. We present a linear index (in words) with an O(|P^-| + occ) query time for the document listing problem. For the top-k version of the problem, we achieve the following results, when the relevance of a document is based on PageRank:

- an O(n) space (in words) index with O(|P^-|log sigma+ k) query time, where sigma is the size of the alphabet from which characters in D are chosen. For constant alphabets, this yields an optimal query time of O(|P^-|+ k).

- for any constant epsilon > 0, a |CSA| + |CSA^*| + Dlog frac{n}{D} + O(n) bits index with O(search(P)+ k cdot tsa cdot log ^{2+epsilon} n) query time, where search(P) is the time to find the suffix range of a pattern P, tsa is the time to find suffix (or inverse suffix) array value, and |CSA^*| denotes the maximum of the space needed to store the compressed suffix array CSA of the concatenated text of all documents, or the total space needed to store the individual CSA of each document.