Hybrid compression of inverted lists for reordered document collections

Text search engines are a fundamental tool nowadays. Their efficiency relies on a popular and simple data structure: inverted indexes. They store an inverted list per term of the vocabulary. The inverted list of a given term stores, among other things, the document identifiers (docIDs) of the documents that contain the term. Currently, inverted indexes can be stored efficiently using integer compression schemes. Previous research also studied how an optimized document ordering can be used to assign docIDs to the document database. This yields important improvements in index compression and query processing time. In this paper we show that using a hybrid compression approach on the inverted lists is more effective in this scenario, with two main contributions: