Low latency index maintenance in indri

There has been a resurgence of interest in index maintenance (or incremental indexing) in the academic community in the last three years. Most of this work focuses on how to build indexes as quickly as possible, given the need to run queries during the build process. This work is based on a different set of assumptions than previous work. First, we focus on latency instead of throughput. We focus on reducing index latency (the amount of time between when a new document is available to be indexed and when it is available to be queried) and query latency (the amount of time that an incoming query must wait because of index processing). Additionally, we assume that users are unwilling to tune parameters to make the system more efficient. We show how this set of assumptions has driven the development of the Indri index maintenance strategy, and describe the details of our implementation.