Efficient query processing infrastructures: A half-day tutorial at SIGIR 2018

Typically, techniques that benefit effectiveness of information retrieval (IR) systems have a negative impact on efficiency. Yet, with the large scale of Web search engines, there is a need to deploy efficient query processing techniques to reduce the cost of the infrastructure required. This tutorial aims to provide a detailed overview of the infrastructure of an IR system devoted to the efficient yet effective processing of user queries. This tutorial guides the attendees through the main ideas, approaches and algorithms developed in the last 30 years in query processing. In particular, we illustrate, with detailed examples and simplified pseudo-code, the most important query processing strategies adopted in major search engines, with a particular focus on dynamic pruning techniques. Moreover, we present and discuss the state-of-the-art innovations in query processing, such as impact-sorted and blockmax indexes. We also describe how modern search engines exploit such algorithms with learning-to-rank (LtR) models to produce effective results, exploiting new approaches in LtR query processing. Finally, this tutorial introduces query efficiency predictors for dynamic pruning, and discusses their main applications to scheduling, routing, selective processing and parallelisation of query processing, as deployed by a major search engine.