Ali M. AlHaj, Eiichiro Sumita, Hitoshi Iida
Massively Parallel Text Retrieval
Abstract:Text retrieval systems are computer-based systems the function of which is
locate user-requested documents in text databases. The requested documents
which are commonly stored in electronic form may include news articles, technical abstracts, office memos, electronic mail messages, among many others.
In fact, the recent widespread of such electronic documents has greatly enhanced the importance of text retrieval systems and made them vital components in modern information systems. A wide variety of operational text
retrieval systems already exit, however, these systems are mostly implemented
on sequential computers which lack both the storage capacity and the retrieval
speed that are needed for large on-line information systems. The research
reported here is based on the argument that parallel computers represent a
potential tool to cope with the increasing computational and storage demands
of modern text retrieval systems. In this report we describe an efficient implementation of an experimental parallel text retrieval system using an MIMD
parallel computer. The system is intended to be the first step towards achieving the ultimate goal of developing an effective and efficient retrieval system
to support the on-going massively parallel example-based spoken language
translation project at ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories.