Parallel text retrieval

Abstract EN

Text retrieval systems are computer-based systems the function of which is to 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 use of such electronics documents has greatly enhanced the importance of text retrieval systems and made them vital components in modem information systems.

A wide variety of operational text retrieval systems exist, however, these systems are mostly implemented on sequential computers which lack both storage capacity and 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 modem text retrieval systems.

In this paper, we describe an efficient implementation of an experimental parallel text retrieval system using an MIMD computer.