INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

DICTIONARIES AND
TOLERANT RETRIEVAL
Lecture 03
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Ch. 2

Recap of the previous lecture

The type/token distinction

Terms are normalized types put in the dictionary

Tokenization problems:

Hyphens, apostrophes, compounds, Chinese

Term equivalence classing:

Numbers, case folding, stemming, lemmatization

Skip pointers

Encoding a tree-like structure in a postings list

Biword indexes for phrases

Positional indexes for phrases/proximity queries
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Ch. 3

This lecture

Dictionary data structures

“Tolerant” retrieval

Wild-card queries

Spelling correction

Soundex
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Dictionary data structures for inverted

indexes

The dictionary data structure stores the term
vocabulary, document frequency, pointers to each
postings list … in what data structure?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

A naïve dictionary

An array of struct:

char[20] int Postings *

20 bytes 4/8 bytes 4/8 bytes

How do we store a dictionary in memory efficiently?

How do we quickly look up elements at query time?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Dictionary data structures

Two main choices:

Hash table

Tree

Some IR systems use hashes, some trees
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Hashes

Each vocabulary term is hashed to an integer

(We assume you’ve seen hashtables before)

Pros:

Lookup is faster than for a tree: O(1)

Cons:

No easy way to find minor variants:

judgment/judgement

No prefix search [tolerant retrieval]

If vocabulary keeps growing, need to occasionally do the
expensive operation of rehashing everything
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Tree: binary tree

Root
a-m n-z

a-hu hy-m n-sh si-z

ot
kle
rk

s
gen

zyg
dva

sic
huy
aar
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Tree: B-tree

a-hu n-z
hy-m

Definition: Every internal nodel has a number of children

in the interval [a,b] where a, b are appropriate natural
numbers, e.g., [2,4].
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Trees

Simplest: binary tree

More usual: B-trees

Trees require a standard ordering of characters and hence
strings … but we standardly have one

Pros:

Solves the prefix problem (terms starting with hyp)

Cons:

Slower: O(log M) [and this requires balanced tree]

Rebalancing binary trees is expensive

But B-trees mitigate the rebalancing problem
CS 6322 Information Retrieval

WILD-CARD QUERIES
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2

Wild-card queries: *

mon*: find all docs containing any word beginning
“mon”.

Easy with binary tree (or B-tree) lexicon: retrieve all
words in range: mon ≤ w < moo

*mon: find words ending in “mon”: harder

Maintain an additional B-tree for terms backwards.
Can retrieve all words in range: nom ≤ w < non.

Exercise: from this, how can we enumerate all terms

meeting the wild-card query pro*cent ?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2

Query processing

At this point, we have an enumeration of all terms in
the dictionary that match the wild-card query.

We still have to look up the postings for each
enumerated term.

E.g., consider the query:
se*ate AND fil*er
This may result in the execution of many Boolean
AND queries.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2

B-trees handle *’s at the end of a

query term

How can we handle *’s in the middle of query term?

co*tion

We could look up co* AND *tion in a B-tree and
intersect the two term sets

Expensive

The solution: transform wild-card queries so that the
*’s occur at the end

This gives rise to the Permuterm Index.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.1

Permuterm index

For term hello, index under:

hello$, ello$h, llo$he, lo$hel, o$hell
where $ is a special symbol.

Queries:

X lookup on X$ X* lookup on $X*

*X lookup on X$* *X* lookup on X*

X*Y lookup on Y$X* X*Y*Z ??? Exercise!

Query = hel*o
X=hel, Y=o
Lookup o$hel*
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.1

Permuterm query processing

Rotate query wild-card to the right

Now use B-tree lookup as before.

Permuterm problem: ≈ quadruples lexicon size
Empirical observation for English.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

Bigram (k-gram) indexes

Enumerate all k-grams (sequence of k chars)
occurring in any term

e.g., from text “April is the cruelest month” we get
the 2-grams (bigrams)

$a,ap,pr,ri,il,l$,$i,is,s$,$t,th,he,e$,$c,cr,ru,
ue,el,le,es,st,t$, $m,mo,on,nt,h$

$ is a special word boundary symbol

Maintain a second inverted index from bigrams to
dictionary terms that match each bigram.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

Bigram index example

The k-gram index finds terms based on a query
consisting of k-grams (here k=2).

$m mace madden

mo among amortize
on among around
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

Processing wild-cards

Query mon* can now be run as

$m AND mo AND on

Gets terms that match AND version of our wildcard
query.

But we’d enumerate moon.

Must post-filter these terms against query.

Surviving enumerated terms are then looked up in
the term-document inverted index.

Fast, space efficient (compared to permuterm).
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

Processing wild-card queries

As before, we must execute a Boolean query for
each enumerated, filtered term.

Wild-cards can result in expensive query execution
(very large disjunctions…)

pyth* AND prog*

If you encourage “laziness” people will respond!

Search
Type your search terms, use ‘*’ if you need to.
E.g., Alex* will match Alexander.

Which web search engines allow wildcard queries?

CS 6322 Information Retrieval

SPELLING CORRECTION
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3

Spell correction

Two principal uses

Correcting document(s) being indexed

Correcting user queries to retrieve “right” answers

Two main flavors:

Isolated word

Check each word on its own for misspelling

Will not catch typos resulting in correctly spelled words

e.g., from → form

Context-sensitive

Look at surrounding words,

e.g., I flew form Heathrow to Narita.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3

Document correction

Especially needed for OCR’ed documents

Correction algorithms are tuned for this: rn/m

Can use domain-specific knowledge

E.g., OCR can confuse O and D more often than it would confuse O
and I (adjacent on the QWERTY keyboard, so more likely
interchanged in typing).

But also: web pages and even printed material has
typos

Goal: the dictionary contains fewer misspellings

But often we don’t change the documents but aim to
fix the query-document mapping
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3

Query mis-spellings

Our principal focus here

E.g., the query Alanis Morisett

We can either

Retrieve documents indexed by the correct spelling, OR

Return several suggested alternative queries with the
correct spelling

Did you mean … ?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.2

Isolated word correction

Fundamental premise – there is a lexicon from which
the correct spellings come

Two basic choices for this

A standard lexicon such as

Webster’s English Dictionary

An “industry-specific” lexicon – hand-maintained

The lexicon of the indexed corpus

E.g., all words on the web

All names, acronyms etc.

(Including the mis-spellings)
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.2

Isolated word correction

Given a lexicon and a character sequence Q, return
the words in the lexicon closest to Q

What’s “closest”?

We’ll study several alternatives

Edit distance (Levenshtein distance)

Weighted edit distance

n-gram overlap
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.3

Edit distance

Given two strings S1 and S2, the minimum number of
operations to convert one to the other

Operations are typically character-level

Insert, Delete, Replace, (Transposition)

E.g., the edit distance from dof to dog is 1

From cat to act is 2 (Just 1 with transpose.)

from cat to dog is 3.

Generally found by dynamic programming.

See [Link] for a nice
example plus an applet.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.3

Weighted edit distance

As above, but the weight of an operation depends on
the character(s) involved

Meant to capture OCR or keyboard errors, e.g. m more
likely to be mis-typed as n than as q

Therefore, replacing m by n is a smaller edit distance than
by q

This may be formulated as a probability model

Requires weight matrix as input

Modify dynamic programming to handle weights
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

Using edit distances

Given query, first enumerate all character sequences
within a preset (weighted) edit distance (e.g., 2)

Intersect this set with list of “correct” words

Show terms you found to user as suggestions

Alternatively,

We can look up all possible corrections in our inverted
index and return all docs … slow

We can run with a single most likely correction

The alternatives disempower the user, but save a
round of interaction with the user
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

Edit distance to all dictionary terms?

Given a (mis-spelled) query – do we compute its edit
distance to every dictionary term?

Expensive and slow

Alternative?

How do we cut the set of candidate dictionary
terms?

One possibility is to use n-gram overlap for this

This can also be used by itself for spelling correction.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

n-gram overlap

Enumerate all the n-grams in the query string as well
as in the lexicon

Use the n-gram index (recall wild-card search) to
retrieve all lexicon terms matching any of the query
n-grams

Threshold by number of matching n-grams

Variants – weight by keyboard layout, etc.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

Example with trigrams

Suppose the text is november

Trigrams are nov, ove, vem, emb, mbe, ber.

The query is december

Trigrams are dec, ece, cem, emb, mbe, ber.

So 3 trigrams overlap (of 6 in each term)

How can we turn this into a normalized measure of
overlap?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

One option – Jaccard coefficient

A commonly-used measure of overlap

Let X and Y be two sets; then the J.C. is

X ∩Y / X ∪Y

Equals 1 when X and Y have the same elements and
zero when they are disjoint

X and Y don’t have to be of the same size

Always assigns a number between 0 and 1

Now threshold to decide if you have a match

E.g., if J.C. > 0.8, declare a match
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

Matching trigrams

Consider the query lord – we wish to identify words
matching 2 of its 3 bigrams (lo, or, rd)

lo alone lord sloth

or border lord morbid
rd ardent border card

Standard postings “merge” will enumerate …

Adapt this to using Jaccard (or another) measure.

CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

Context-sensitive spell correction

Text: I flew from Heathrow to Narita.

Consider the phrase query “flew form Heathrow”

We’d like to respond
Did you mean “flew from Heathrow”?
because no docs matched the query phrase.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

Context-sensitive correction

Need surrounding context to catch this.

First idea: retrieve dictionary terms close (in
weighted edit distance) to each query term

Now try all possible resulting phrases with one word
“fixed” at a time

flew from heathrow

fled form heathrow

flea form heathrow

Hit-based spelling correction: Suggest the
alternative that has lots of hits.
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

Exercise

Suppose that for “flew form Heathrow” we have 7
alternatives for flew, 19 for form and 3 for heathrow.
How many “corrected” phrases will we enumerate in
this scheme?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

Another approach

Break phrase query into a conjunction of biwords
(Lecture 2).

Look for biwords that need only one term corrected.

Enumerate phrase matches and … rank them!
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

General issues in spell correction

We enumerate multiple alternatives for “Did you
mean?”

Need to figure out which to present to the user

Use heuristics

The alternative hitting most docs

Query log analysis + tweaking

For especially popular, topical queries

Spell-correction is computationally expensive

Avoid running routinely on every query?

Run only on queries that matched few docs
CS 6322 Information Retrieval

SOUNDEX
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

Soundex

Class of heuristics to expand a query into phonetic
equivalents

Language specific – mainly for names

E.g., chebyshev → tchebycheff

Invented for the U.S. census … in 1918
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

Soundex – typical algorithm

Turn every token to be indexed into a 4-character
reduced form

Do the same with query terms

Build and search an index on the reduced forms

(when the query calls for a soundex match)

[Link]
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

Soundex – typical algorithm

1. Retain the first letter of the word.
2. Change all occurrences of the following letters to '0'
(zero):
'A', E', 'I', 'O', 'U', 'H', 'W', 'Y'.
3. Change letters to digits as follows:

B, F, P, V → 1

C, G, J, K, Q, S, X, Z → 2

D,T → 3

L→4

M, N → 5

R→6
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

Soundex continued
4. Remove all pairs of consecutive digits.
5. Remove all zeros from the resulting string.
6. Pad the resulting string with trailing zeros and
return the first four positions, which will be of the
form <uppercase letter> <digit> <digit> <digit>.

E.g., Herman becomes H655.

Will hermann generate the same code?

CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

Soundex

Soundex is the classic algorithm, provided by most
databases (Oracle, Microsoft, …)

How useful is soundex?

Not very – for information retrieval

Okay for “high recall” tasks (e.g., Interpol), though
biased to names of certain nationalities

Zobel and Dart (1996) show that other algorithms for
phonetic matching perform much better in the
context of IR
CS 6322 Information Retrieval

What queries can we process?

We have

Positional inverted index with skip pointers

Wild-card index

Spell-correction

Soundex

Queries such as
(SPELL(moriset) /3 toron*to) OR SOUNDEX(chaikofski)
CS 6322 Information Retrieval

Exercise

Draw yourself a diagram showing the various indexes
in a search engine incorporating all the functionality
we have talked about

Identify some of the key design choices in the index
pipeline:

Does stemming happen before the Soundex index?

What about n-grams?

Given a query, how would you parse and dispatch
sub-queries to the various indexes?
CS 6322 Information Retrieval Sec. 3.5

Resources

IIR 3, MG 4.2

Efficient spell retrieval:

K. Kukich. Techniques for automatically correcting words in text. ACM
Computing Surveys 24(4), Dec 1992.

J. Zobel and P. Dart. Finding approximate matches in large
lexicons. Software - practice and experience 25(3), March 1995.
[Link]

Mikael Tillenius: Efficient Generation and Ranking of Spelling Error
Corrections. Master’s thesis at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology.
[Link]

Nice, easy reading on spell correction:

Peter Norvig: How to write a spelling corrector
[Link]