A MapReduce Based Distributed LSI for Scalable Information Retrieval

Abstract

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) has been widely used in information retrieval due to its efficiency in solving the problems of polysemy and synonymy. However, LSI is notably a computationally intensive process because of the computing complexities of singular value decomposition and filtering operations involved in the process. This paper presents MR-LSI, a MapReduce based distributed LSI algorithm for scalable information retrieval. The performance of MR-LSI is first evaluated in a small scale experimental cluster environment, and subsequently evaluated in large scale simulation environments. By partitioning the dataset into smaller subsets and optimizing the partitioned subsets across a cluster of computing nodes, the overhead of the MR-LSI algorithm is reduced significantly while maintaining a high level of accuracy in retrieving documents of user interest. A genetic algorithm based load balancing scheme is designed to optimize the performance of MR-LSI in heterogeneous computing environments in which the computing nodes have varied resources.