Matthias Petri

Joel Mackenzie, Matthias Petri, Alistair Moffat

The recent MSMARCO passage retrieval collection has allowed researchers to develop highly tuned retrieval systems. One aspect of this data set that makes it distinctive compared to traditional corpora is that most of the topics only have a single answer passage marked relevant. Here we carry out a "what if" sensitivity study, asking whether a set of systems would still have the same relative performance if more passages per topic were deemed to be "relevant", exploring several mechanisms for identifying sets of passages to be so categorized. Our results show that, in general, while run scores can vary markedly if additional plausible passages are presumed to be relevant, the derived system ordering is relatively insensitive to additional relevance, providing support for the methodology that was used at the time the MSMARCO passage collection was created.

Joel Mackenzie, Matthias Petri, Alistair Moffat

Inverted indexes continue to be a mainstay of text search engines, allowing efficient querying of large document collections. While there are a number of possible organizations, document-ordered indexes are the most common, since they are amenable to various query types, support index updates, and allow for efficient dynamic pruning operations. One disadvantage with document-ordered indexes is that high-scoring documents can be distributed across the document identifier space, meaning that index traversal algorithms that terminate early might put search effectiveness at risk. The alternative is impact-ordered indexes, which primarily support top-k disjunctions, but also allow for anytime query processing, where the search can be terminated at any time, with search quality improving as processing latency increases. Anytime query processing can be used to effectively reduce high-percentile tail latency which is essential for operational scenarios in which a service level agreement (SLA) imposes response time requirements. In this work, we show how document-ordered indexes can be organized such that they can be queried in an anytime fashion, enabling strict latency control with effective early termination. Our experiments show that processing document-ordered topical segments selected by a simple score estimator outperforms existing anytime algorithms, and allows query runtimes to be accurately limited in order to comply with SLA requirements.

Ehsan Shareghi, Matthias Petri, Gholamreza Haffari et al.

Efficient methods for storing and querying are critical for scaling high-order n-gram language models to large corpora. We propose a language model based on compressed suffix trees, a representation that is highly compact and can be easily held in memory, while supporting queries needed in computing language model probabilities on-the-fly. We present several optimisations which improve query runtimes up to 2500x, despite only incurring a modest increase in construction time and memory usage. For large corpora and high Markov orders, our method is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art KenLM package. It imposes much lower memory requirements, often by orders of magnitude, and has runtimes that are either similar (for training) or comparable (for querying).

Simon Gog, Matthias Petri

We engineer a self-index based retrieval system capable of rank-safe evaluation of top-k queries. The framework generalizes the GREEDY approach of Culpepper et al. (ESA 2010) to handle multi-term queries, including over phrases. We propose two techniques which significantly reduce the ranking time for a wide range of popular Information Retrieval (IR) relevance measures, such as TFxIDF and BM25. First, we reorder elements in the document array according to document weight. Second, we introduce the repetition array, which generalizes Sadakane's (JDA 2007) document frequency structure to document subsets. Combining document and repetition array, we achieve attractive functionality-space trade-offs. We provide an extensive evaluation of our system on terabyte-sized IR collections.