A Search Engine for Natural Language Applications

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 5:32

Many modern natural language-processing applications utilize search engines to locate large numbers of Web documents or to compute statistics over the Web corpus. Yet Web search engines are designed and optimized for simple human queries---they are not well suited to support such applications. As a result, these applications are forced to issue millions of successive queries resulting in unnecessary search engine load and in slow applications with limited scalability.   As a replacement, we propose the Bindings Engine (BE), which supports queries that contain typed variables and string-processing functions.   These primitives are well-suited to the needs of natural language applications. Further, BE's novel neighborhood index enables it to process such queries very efficiently. As a result, BE can yield several orders of magnitude of speedup for large-scale applications, incurring only a modest cost in index storage space and computation overhead.