Inverted indexes are vital in providing fast key-word-based search. For every
term in the document collection, a list of identifiers of documents in which
the term appears is stored, along with auxiliary information such as term
frequency, and position offsets. While very effective, inverted indexes have
large memory requirements for web-sized collections. Recently, the concept of
learned index structures was introduced, where machine learned models replace
common index structures such as B-tree-indexes, hash-indexes, and
bloom-filters. These learned index structures require less memory, and can be
computationally much faster than their traditional counterparts. In this paper,
we consider whether such models may be applied to conjunctive Boolean querying.
First, we investigate how a learned model can replace document postings of an
inverted index, and then evaluate the compromises such an approach might have.
Second, we evaluate the potential gains that can be achieved in terms of memory
requirements. Our work shows that learned models have great potential in
inverted indexing, and this direction seems to be a promising area for future
research.Comment: Will appear in the proceedings of ADCS'1