Expressiveness and performance of full-text search languages

  • Authors:
  • Chavdar Botev;Sihem Amer-Yahia;Jayavel Shanmugasundaram

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;AT&T Labs–Research, Florham Park, NJ;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • EDBT'06 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Advances in Database Technology
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We study the expressiveness and performance of full-text search languages. Our motivation is to provide a formal basis for comparing full-text search languages and to develop a model for full-text search that can be tightly integrated with structured search. We design a model based on the positions of tokens (words) in the input text, and develop a full-text calculus (FTC) and a full-text algebra (FTA) with equivalent expressive power; this suggests a notion of completeness for full-text search languages. We show that existing full-text languages are incomplete and identify a practical subset of the FTC and FTA that is more powerful than existing languages, but which can still be evaluated efficiently.