Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Introducing Information Retrieval
and Web Search
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually
documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text)
that satisfies an information need from within large
collections (usually stored on computers).
These days we frequently think first of web search, but
there are many other cases:
E-mail search
Searching your laptop
Corporate knowledge bases
Legal information retrieval
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Unstructured (text) vs. structured
(database) data in the mid-nineties
250
200
150
Unstructured
Structured
100
50
0
Data volume Market Cap
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Unstructured (text) vs. structured
(database) data today
250
200
150
Unstructured
Structured
100
50
0
Data volume Market Cap
4
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Basic assumptions of Information Retrieval
Collection: A set of documents
Assume it is a static collection for the moment
Goal: Retrieve documents with information that is
relevant to the user’s information need and helps the
user complete a task
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
The classic search model
User task Get rid of mice in a
politically correct way
Misconception?
Info need
Info about removing mice
without killing them
Misformulation?
Query
how trap mice alive Search
Search
engine
Query Results
Collection
refinement
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
How good are the retrieved docs?
Precision : Fraction of retrieved docs that are
relevant to the user’s information need
Recall : Fraction of relevant docs in collection that are
retrieved
More precise definitions and measurements to follow later
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Term-document incidence matrices
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Unstructured data in 1620
Which plays of Shakespeare contain the words Brutus
AND Caesar but NOT Calpurnia?
One could grep all of Shakespeare’s plays for Brutus
and Caesar, then strip out lines containing Calpurnia?
Why is that not the answer?
Slow (for large corpora)
NOT Calpurnia is non-trivial
Other operations (e.g., find the word Romans near
countrymen) not feasible
Ranked retrieval (best documents to return)
Later lectures
9
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Term-document incidence matrices
Brutus AND Caesar BUT NOT 1 if play contains
Calpurnia word, 0 otherwise
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Incidence vectors
So we have a 0/1 vector for each term.
To answer query: take the vectors for Brutus, Caesar
and Calpurnia (complemented) bitwise AND.
110100 AND
110111 AND
101111 =
100100
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Answers to query
Antony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene ii
Agrippa [Aside to DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS]: Why, Enobarbus,
When Antony found Julius Caesar dead,
He cried almost to roaring; and he wept
When at Philippi he found Brutus slain.
Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii
Lord Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar I was killed i’ the
Capitol; Brutus killed me.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Bigger collections
Consider N = 1 million documents, each with about
1000 words.
Avg 6 bytes/word including spaces/punctuation
6GB of data in the documents.
Say there are M = 500K distinct terms among these.
13
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.1
Can’t build the matrix
500K x 1M matrix has half-a-trillion 0’s and 1’s.
But it has no more than one billion 1’s. Why?
matrix is extremely sparse.
What’s a better representation?
We only record the 1 positions.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
The Inverted Index
The key data structure underlying modern IR
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Inverted index
For each term t, we must store a list of all documents
that contain t.
Identify each doc by a docID, a document serial number
Can we use fixed-size arrays for this?
Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101
What happens if the word Caesar
is added to document 14?
16
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Inverted index
We need variable-size postings lists
On disk, a continuous run of postings is normal and best
In memory, can use linked lists or variable length arrays
Some tradeoffs in size/ease of insertion
Posting
Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101
Dictionary Postings
Sorted by docID (more later on why). 17
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Inverted index construction
Documents to Friends, Romans, countrymen.
be indexed
Tokenize
r
Token stream Friends Romans Countrymen
Linguistic modules
Modified tokens friend roman countryman
Indexe
friend 2 4
r
roman 1 2
Inverted index
countryman 13 16
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Initial stages of text processing
Tokenization
Cut character sequence into word tokens
Deal with “John’s”, a state-of-the-art solution
Normalization
Map text and query term to same form
You want U.S.A. and USA to match
Stemming
We may wish different forms of a root to match
authorize, authorization
Stop words
We may omit very common words (or not)
the, a, to, of
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Indexer steps: Token sequence
Sequence of (Modified token, Document ID) pairs.
Doc 1 Doc 2
I did enact Julius So let it be with
Caesar I was killed Caesar. The noble
i’ the Capitol; Brutus hath told you
Brutus killed me. Caesar was ambitious
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Indexer steps: Sort
Sort by terms
At least conceptually
And then docID
Core indexing step
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Indexer steps: Dictionary & Postings
Multiple term
entries in a single
document are
merged.
Split into Dictionary
and Postings
Doc. frequency
information is
added.
Why frequency?
Will discuss later.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.2
Where do we pay in storage?
Lists of
docIDs
Terms
and
counts IR system
implementation
• How do we
index efficiently?
• How much
storage do we
need?
Pointers 23
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Query processing with an inverted index
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
The index we just built
How do we process a query? Our focus
Later – what kinds of queries can we process?
25
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
Query processing: AND
Consider processing the query:
Brutus AND Caesar
Locate Brutus in the Dictionary;
Retrieve its postings.
Locate Caesar in the Dictionary;
Retrieve its postings.
“Merge” the two postings (intersect the document sets):
2 4 8 16 32 64 128 Brutus
1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 Caesar
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
The merge
Walk through the two postings simultaneously, in
time linear in the total number of postings entries
2 4 8 16 32 64 128 Brutus
1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 Caesar
If the list lengths are x and y, the merge takes O(x+y)
operations.
Crucial: postings sorted by docID.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Intersecting two postings lists
(a “merge” algorithm)
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
The Boolean Retrieval Model
& Extended Boolean Models
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
Boolean queries: Exact match
The Boolean retrieval model is being able to ask a
query that is a Boolean expression:
Boolean Queries are queries using AND, OR and NOT to
join query terms
Views each document as a set of words
Is precise: document matches condition or not.
Perhaps the simplest model to build an IR system on
Primary commercial retrieval tool for 3 decades.
Many search systems you still use are Boolean:
Email, library catalog, macOS Spotlight
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.4
Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/
Largest commercial (paying subscribers) legal
search service (started 1975; ranking added
1992; new federated search added 2010)
Tens of terabytes of data; ~700,000 users
Majority of users still use boolean queries
Example query:
What is the statute of limitations in cases involving
the federal tort claims act?
LIMIT! /3 STATUTE ACTION /S FEDERAL /2
TORT /3 CLAIM
/3 = within 3 words, /S = in same sentence
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.4
Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/
Another example query:
Requirements for disabled people to be able to access a
workplace
disabl! /p access! /s work-site work-place (employment /3
place
Note that SPACE is disjunction, not conjunction!
Long, precise queries; proximity operators;
incrementally developed; not like web search
Many professional searchers still like Boolean search
You know exactly what you are getting
But that doesn’t mean it actually works better….
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
Boolean queries:
More general merges
Exercise: Adapt the merge for the queries:
Brutus AND NOT Caesar
Brutus OR NOT Caesar
Can we still run through the merge in time O(x+y)?
What can we achieve?
33
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
Merging
What about an arbitrary Boolean formula?
(Brutus OR Caesar) AND NOT
(Antony OR Cleopatra)
Can we always merge in “linear” time?
Linear in what?
Can we do better?
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
Query optimization
What is the best order for query processing?
Consider a query that is an AND of n terms.
For each of the n terms, get its postings, then
AND them together.
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 16 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16
Query: Brutus AND Calpurnia AND Caesar 35
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
Query optimization example
Process in order of increasing freq:
start with smallest set, then keep cutting further.
This is why we kept
document freq. in dictionary
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 16 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16
Execute the query as (Calpurnia AND Brutus) AND Caesar.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Exercise
Recommend a query
processing order for
(tangerine OR trees) AND
(marmalade OR skies) AND
(kaleidoscope OR eyes)
Which two terms should we
process first?
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 1.3
More general optimization
e.g., (madding OR crowd) AND (ignoble OR
strife)
Get doc. freq.’s for all terms.
Estimate the size of each OR by the sum of its
doc. freq.’s (conservative).
Process in increasing order of OR sizes.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Phrase queries and positional indexes
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4
Phrase queries
We want to be able to answer queries such as
“stanford university” – as a phrase
Thus the sentence “I went to university at Stanford”
is not a match.
The concept of phrase queries has proven easily
understood by users; one of the few “advanced search”
ideas that works
Many more queries are implicit phrase queries
For this, it no longer suffices to store only
<term : docs> entries
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.1
A first attempt: Biword indexes
Index every consecutive pair of terms in the text as a
phrase
For example the text “Friends, Romans, Countrymen”
would generate the biwords
friends romans
romans countrymen
Each of these biwords is now a dictionary term
Two-word phrase query-processing is now
immediate.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.1
Longer phrase queries
Longer phrases can be processed by breaking them
down
stanford university palo alto can be broken into the
Boolean query on biwords:
stanford university AND university palo AND palo alto
Without the docs, we cannot verify that the docs
matching the above Boolean query do contain the
phrase.
Can have false positives!
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.1
Issues for biword indexes
False positives, as noted before
Index blowup due to bigger dictionary
Infeasible for more than biwords, big even for them
Biword indexes are not the standard solution (for all
biwords) but can be part of a compound strategy
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Solution 2: Positional indexes
In the postings, store, for each term the position(s) in
which tokens of it appear:
<term, number of docs containing term;
doc1: position1, position2 … ;
doc2: position1, position2 … ;
etc.>
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Positional index example
<be: 993427;
1: 7, 18, 33, 72, 86, 231; Which of docs 1,2,4,5
2: 3, 149; could contain “to be
4: 17, 191, 291, 430, 434; or not to be”?
5: 363, 367, …>
For phrase queries, we use a merge algorithm
recursively at the document level
But we now need to deal with more than just
equality
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Processing a phrase query
Extract inverted index entries for each distinct term:
to, be, or, not.
Merge their doc:position lists to enumerate all
positions with “to be or not to be”.
to:
2:1,17,74,222,551; 4:8,16,190,429,433; 7:13,23,191; ...
be:
1:17,19; 4:17,191,291,430,434; 5:14,19,101; ...
Same general method for proximity searches
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Proximity queries
LIMIT! /3 STATUTE /3 FEDERAL /2 TORT
Again, here, /k means “within k words of”.
Clearly, positional indexes can be used for such
queries; biword indexes cannot.
Exercise: Adapt the linear merge of postings to
handle proximity queries. Can you make it work for
any value of k?
This is a little tricky to do correctly and efficiently
See Figure 2.12 of IIR
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Positional index size
A positional index expands postings storage
substantially
Even though indices can be compressed
Nevertheless, a positional index is now standardly
used because of the power and usefulness of phrase
and proximity queries … whether used explicitly or
implicitly in a ranking retrieval system.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Positional index size
Need an entry for each occurrence, not just once per
document
Index size depends on average document size Why?
Average web page has <1000 terms
SEC filings, books, even some epic poems … easily 100,000
terms
Consider a term with frequency 0.1%
Document size Postings Positional postings
1000 1 1
100,000 1 100
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.2
Rules of thumb
A positional index is 2–4 as large as a non-positional
index
Positional index size 35–50% of volume of original
text
Caveat: all of this holds for “English-like” languages
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 2.4.3
Combination schemes
These two approaches can be profitably combined
For particular phrases (“Michael Jackson”, “Britney
Spears”) it is inefficient to keep on merging positional
postings lists
Even more so for phrases like “The Who”
Williams et al. (2004) evaluate a more sophisticated
mixed indexing scheme
A typical web query mixture was executed in ¼ of the time
of using just a positional index
It required 26% more space than having a positional index
alone
