Fast evaluation of structured queries for information retrieval

Information retrieval systems are being challenged to manage larger and larger document collections. In an effort to provide better retrieval performance on large collections, more sophisticated retrieval techniques have been developed that support rich, structured queries. Structured queries are not amenable to previously proposed optimization techniques. Optimizing execution, however, is even more important in the context of large document collections. We present a new structured query optimization technique which we have implemented in an inference network-based information retrieval system. Experimental results show that query evaluation time can be reduced by more than half with little impact on retrieval effectiveness.