Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Inverted Files

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 54 Accesses

Synonyms

Full text inverted index; 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 [1].

In a seminal work, Gerard Salton wrote a book in 1968, containing the basis for the modern information retrieval systems [2],...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  1. Luhn HP. A statistical approach to mechanized encoding and searching of literary information. IBM J Res Dev. 1957;1:309–17.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Salton G. Automatic information organization and retrieval. New York: McGraw-Hill; 1968.

    Google Scholar 

  3. de Moura ES, dos Santos CF, Fernandes DR, Silva AS, Calado P, Nascimento MA. Improving web search efficiency via a locality based static pruning method. Proceedings of 14th International World Wide Web Conference; 2005. p. 235–44.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Baeza-Yates R, Ribeiro-Neto B. Modern information retrieval. 2nd ed. Reading: Addison Wesley; 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Anh V, Moffat A. Pruned query evaluation using pre-computed impacts. ACM SIGIR. 2006. p. 372–9.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Anh V, Kretser O de, Moffat A. Vector-space ranking with effective early termination. ACM SIGIR. 2001. p. 35–42.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Strohman T, Croft WB. Efficient document retrieval in main memory. ACM SIGIR; 2007. p. 175–82.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Ding S, Suel T. Faster top-k document retrieval using block-max in- dexes. ACM SIGIR. 2011. p. 993–1002.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Rossi C, de Moura ES, Carvalho AL, da Silva AS. Fast document-at-a-time query processing using two-tier indexes. ACM SIGIR; 2013. p. 183–92.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Marcus F, Vanja J, Jinhui L, Srihari V, Xi-angfei Z, Zien Jason Y. Evaluation strategies for top-k queries over memory- resident inverted indexes. PVLDB. 2011;4(12):1213–24.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Long X, Suel T. Three-level caching for efficient query processing in large Web search engines. Proceedings of 14th International World Wide Web Conference; 2005. p. 257–66.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kaszkiel M, Zobel J. Term-ordered query evaluation versus document- ordered query evaluation for large document databases. Proceedings of 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1998. p. 343–4.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

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
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Marco Antonio Cristo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Edleno Silva De Moura .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. of Computing Science, Univ. of Alberta, T6G 2E8, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Mario A. Nascimento

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

De Moura, E.S., Cristo, M.A. (2017). Inverted Files. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1136-2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1136-2

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation