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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1571–1574Cite as

Inverted Files

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  • 1851 Accesses

Synonyms

Inverted index; Full text inverted index; Postings file

Definition

An Inverted file is an index data structure that maps content to its location within a database file, in a document or in a set of documents. It is normally composed of: (i) a vocabulary that contains all the distinct words found in a text and (ii), for each word t of the vocabulary, a list that contains statistics about the occurrences of t in the text. Such list is known as the inverted list of t. The inverted file is the most popular data structure used in document retrieval systems to support full text search.

Historical Background

Efforts for indexing electronic texts are found in literature since the beginning of the computational systems. For example, descriptions of Electronic Information Search Systems that are able to index and search text can be found in the early 1950s [4].

In a seminal work, Gerard Salton wrote a book in 1968, containing the basis for the modern information retrieval systems [6],...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Baeza-Yates R. and Ribeiro-Neto B. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1999.

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  2. Kaszkiel M. and Zobel J. Term-ordered query evaluation versus document-ordered query evaluation for large document databases. In Proc. 21st Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1998, pp. 343–344.

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  3. Long X. and Suel T. Three-level caching for efficient query processing in large Web search engines. In Proc. 14th Int. World Wide Web Conference, 2005, pp. 257–266.

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  4. Luhn H.P. A statistical approach to mechanized encoding and searching of literary information. IBM J. Res. and Dev., 309–317, October 1957.

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  5. de Moura E.S., dos Santos C.F., Fernandes D.R., Silva A.S., Calado P., and Nascimento M.A. Improving web search efficiency via a locality based static pruning method. In Proc. 14th Int. World Wide Web Conference, 2005, pp. 235–244.

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  6. Salton G. Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1968.

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  7. Witten I., Moffat A., and Bell T. Managing Gigabytes, 2nd edn. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA, 1999.

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  8. Zobel J. and Moffat A. Inverted Files for Text Search Engines. ACM Comput. Surv., 38(2):1–56, July 2006.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil

    Edleno Silva de Moura

  2. FUCAPI, Manaus, Brazil

    Marco Antonio Cristo

Authors
  1. Edleno Silva de Moura
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  2. Marco Antonio Cristo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Moura, E.S., Cristo, M.A. (2009). Inverted Files. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1136

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