The HS file: A new dynamic signature file method for efficient information retrieval

Abstract

Many works on the signature file methods have been made in the past, but they are mainly for static environments. However, many recent applications in practice require a dynamic information storage structure that effectively supports insertions, deletions and updates. Though there are a few signature file techiniques for dynamic: environments, they suffer from serious performance degradation when query signature weights are light. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic signature file organization, called the hierarchical signature (HS) file, that solves the problem of light query signature weights. We perform simulation experiments by using wide range of parameter values. We show through performance comparison based on experiments that the HS file improves performance significantly in both the retrieval time and the storage overhead over the other dynamic signature file methods proposed earlier.