ACCESSING TEXTURAL DOCUMENTS USING COMPRESSED INDEXES OF ARRAYS OF SMALL BLOOM FILTERS.

Abstract

A highly compressed index for a collection of variable-sized documents is described. Arrays of small Bloom filters are used to efficiently locate documents where the search probe contains 'anded' and 'ored' combinations of words. Theoretical and experimental results are reported. The method is applicable to unplanned searching of large text files. We further describe a method to provide an index to the filters. Thus only a small proportion of the compressed filter need be examined. The method is highly amenable to parallel processing.