Fast first-phase candidate generation for cascading rankers

Current search engines use very complex ranking functions based on hundreds of features. While such functions return high-quality results, they create efficiency challenges as it is too costly to fully evaluate them on all documents in the union, or even intersection, of the query terms. To address this issue, search engines use a series of cascading rankers, starting with a very simple ranking function and then applying increasingly complex and expensive ranking functions on smaller and smaller sets of candidate results. Researchers have recently started studying several problems within this framework of query processing by cascading rankers; see, e.g., [5, 13, 17, 51]. We focus on one such problem, the design of the initial cascade. Thus, the goal is to very quickly identify a set of good candidate documents that should be passed to the second and further cascades. Previous work by Asadi and Lin [3, 5] showed that while a top-κ computation on either the union or intersection gives good results, a further optimization using a global document ordering based on spam scores leads to a significant reduction in quality. Our contribution is to propose an alternative framework that builds specialized single-term and pairwise index structures, and then during query time selectively accesses these structures based on a cost budget and a set of early termination techniques. Using an end-to-end evaluation with a complex machine-learned ranker, we show that our approach finds candidates about an order of magnitude faster than a conjunctive top-κ computation, while essentially matching the quality.