1 research outputs found
Query Reranking As A Service
The ranked retrieval model has rapidly become the de facto way for search
query processing in client-server databases, especially those on the web.
Despite of the extensive efforts in the database community on designing better
ranking functions/mechanisms, many such databases in practice still fail to
address the diverse and sometimes contradicting preferences of users on tuple
ranking, perhaps (at least partially) due to the lack of expertise and/or
motivation for the database owner to design truly effective ranking functions.
This paper takes a different route on addressing the issue by defining a novel
{\em query reranking problem}, i.e., we aim to design a third-party service
that uses nothing but the public search interface of a client-server database
to enable the on-the-fly processing of queries with any user-specified ranking
functions (with or without selection conditions), no matter if the ranking
function is supported by the database or not. We analyze the worst-case
complexity of the problem and introduce a number of ideas, e.g., on-the-fly
indexing, domination detection and virtual tuple pruning, to reduce the
average-case cost of the query reranking algorithm. We also present extensive
experimental results on real-world datasets, in both offline and live online
systems, that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques.Comment: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 9, No. 11, 201