Use of text signatures for document retrieval in a highly parallel environment

This paper considers the use of text signatures, fixed-length bit string representations of document content, in an experimental information retrieval system: such signatures may be generated from the list of keywords characterising a document or a query. A file of documents may be searched in a bit-serial parallel computer, such as the ICL Distributed Array Processor, using a two-level retrieval strategy in which a comparison of a query signature with the file of document signatures provides a simple and efficient means of identifying those few documents that need to undergo a computationally demanding, character matching search. Text retrieval experiments using three large collections of documents and queries demonstrate the efficiency of the suggested approach.