TextBenDS: a Generic Textual Data Benchmark for Distributed Systems

Extracting top-k keywords and documents using weighting schemes are popular techniques employed in text mining and machine learning for different analysis and retrieval tasks. The weights are usually computed in the data preprocessing step, as they are costly to update and keep track of all the modifications performed on the dataset. Furthermore, calculation errors are introduced when analyzing only subsets of the dataset, i.e., wrong weighting are computed as weighting schemes use the number of documents for scoring keywords and documents. Therefore, in a Big Data context, it is crucial to lower the runtime of computing weighting schemes, without hindering the analysis process and the accuracy of the machine learning algorithms. To address this requirement for the task of computing top-k keywords and documents (which largely relies on weighting schemes), it is customary to design benchmarks that compare weighting schemes within various configurations of distributedframeworks and database management systems. Thus, we propose TextBenDS - a generic document-oriented benchmark for storing textual data and constructing weighting schemes. Our benchmark offers a generic data model designed with a multidimensional approach for storing text documents. We also propose using aggregation queries with various complexities and selectivities for constructing term weighting schemes, that are utilized in extracting top-k keywords and documents. We evaluate the computing performance of the queries on several distributed environments set within the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. Our experimental results provide interesting insights. As an example, MongoDB shows the best overall performance, while Spark’s execution time remains almost constant regardless of weighting schemes.