Compact full-text indexing of versioned document collections.

We study the problem of creating highly compressed full-text index structures for versioned document collections, that is, collections that contain multiple versions of each document. Important examples of such collections are Wikipedia or the web page archive maintained by the Internet Archive. A straightforward indexing approach would simply treat each document version as a separate document, such that index size scales linearly with the number of versions. However, several authors have recently studied approaches that exploit the significant similarities between different versions of the same document to obtain much smaller index sizes. In this paper, we propose new techniques for organizing and compressing inverted index structures for such collections. We also perform a detailed experimental comparison of new techniques and the existing techniques in the literature. Our results on an archive of the English version of Wikipedia, and on a subset of the Internet Archive collection, show significant benefits over previous approaches.