Efficient Top-k Query Processing for Text, Semistructured, and Structured Data

TopX is a top-k retrieval engine for text and XML data. Unlike Boolean engines, it stops query processing as soon as it can safely determine the k top-ranked result objects according to a monotonous score aggregation function with respect to a multidimensional query. The main contributions of the thesis unfold into four main points, confirmed by previous publications at international conferences or workshops: \beginitemize \item Top-k query processing with probabilistic guarantees. \item Index-access optimized top-k query processing. \item Dynamic and self-tuning, incremental query expansion for top-k query processing. \item Efficient support for ranked XML retrieval and full-text search. \enditemize Our experiments demonstrate the viability and improved efficiency of our approach compared to existing related work for a broad variety of retrieval scenarios.