CI-6226

Lecture 2. Boolean Retrieval

Information Retrieval and Analysis

Vasily Sidorov
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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Related Definitions
• Related definitions
– Information need: The topic about which the user
desires to know more
– Query: What the user conveys to the computer in
an attempt to communicate the information need
– Relevant document: user perceives as containing
information of value with respect to the
information need
Unstructured (text) vs. structured (database)
data in the 1996
250

200

150
Unstructured
Structured
100

50

0
DATA VOLUME MARKET CAP

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Unstructured (text) vs. structured (database)
data in 2006
250

200

150
Unstructured
Structured
100

50

0
DATA VOLUME MARKET CAP

5
Boolean Retrieval
• The Boolean model is arguably the simplest
model to base an information retrieval system
on
• Queries are Boolean expressions
– Example: Brutus AND Caesar
• The search engine return all documents that
satisfy the Boolean expression
– without ranking?
 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
– grep is line-oriented, we are interested in documents
– Ranked retrieval (best documents to return)
• Later lectures
7
 Sec. 1.1

Term-document incidence matrices

Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth
Antony 1 1 0 0 0 1
Brutus 1 1 0 1 0 0
Caesar 1 1 0 1 1 1
Calpurnia 0 1 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 1 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 1 0 1 1 1 1
worser 1 0 1 1 1 0

Brutus AND Caesar BUT NOT 1 if play contains

Calpurnia word, 0 otherwise
 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 Antony
Antony and Cleopatra

1
Julius Caesar

1
The Tempest

0
Hamlet

0
Othello

0
Macbeth

1
Brutus 1 1 0 1 0 0

– 110111 AND Caesar

Calpurnia
1
0
1
1
0
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
Cleopatra 1 0 0 0 0 0

– 101111 = mercy
worser
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
0

– 100100

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 Sec. 1.1

Answers to the 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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 Sec. 1.1

Bigger collections
• Consider N = 1 million documents, each with
about 1000 words.
• Avg 6 bytes/word including spaces and
punctuation
– 6 GB of data in the documents overall
• Say there are M = 500K distinct terms among
these.

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 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

• Inverted index!
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 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?
13
 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).
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Inverted index construction
Documents to Friends, Romans, countrymen.
be indexed

Tokenizer

Token stream Friends Romans Countrymen

Linguistic modules

Modified tokens friend roman countryman

Indexer friend 2 4
roman 1 2
Inverted index
countryman 13 16
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
 Sec. 1.2

Indexer steps: Token sequence

Term docID
I 1

Sequence of (Modified token, Document ID) pairs. did

enact
1
1
julius 1
caesar 1
I 1
was 1
killed 1
i' 1
the 1
Doc 1 Doc 2 capitol
brutus
1
1
killed 1
me 1
so 2
I did enact Julius So let it be with let 2
Caesar I was killed Caesar. The noble it
be
2
2
i’ the Capitol; Brutus hath told you with 2
caesar 2
Brutus killed me. Caesar was ambitious the 2
noble 2
brutus 2
hath 2
told 2
you 2
caesar 2
was 2
ambitious 2
 Sec. 1.2

Indexer steps: Sort I

Term docID
1
Term
ambitious
docID
2
did 1 be 2
enact 1 brutus 1
julius 1 brutus 2

• Sort by terms caesar

I
was
1
1
1
capitol
caesar
caesar
1
1
2

– And then docID

killed 1 caesar 2
i' 1 did 1
the 1 enact 1
capitol 1 hath 1
brutus 1 I 1
killed 1 I 1
me 1 i' 1
so 2
Core indexing step let
it
2
2
it
julius
2
1
killed 1
be 2 killed 1
with 2 let 2
caesar 2 me 1
the 2 noble 2
noble 2 so 2
brutus 2 the 1
hath 2 the 2
told 2 told 2
you 2 you 2
caesar 2 was 1
was 2 was 2
ambitious 2 with 2
 Indexer steps: Dictionary & Postings
Multiple term entries in a single Term docID
ambitious 2
document are merged be 2
brutus 1
brutus 2
capitol 1

Split into Dictionary and Postings caesar

caesar
1
2
caesar 2
did 1
enact 1
Doc. frequency information is hath
I
1
1
added I
i'
1
1
it 2
julius 1
killed 1
killed 1
let 2
me 1
noble 2
so 2
Why frequency? the
the
1
2
Will discuss later. told 2
you 2
was 1
was 2
with 2
 Sec. 1.2

Where do we pay in storage?

Lists of
docIDs

Terms
and
counts
Later in the course
• How do we index
efficiently?
• How much storage
do we need?

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Pointers
 Sec. 1.3

The index we just built

• How do we process a query? Our focus

– Later - what kinds of queries can we process?

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 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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 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
2 8
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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Intersecting two postings lists
(a “merge” algorithm)

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 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, Mac OS X Spotlight
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 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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 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….
 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?

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 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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 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 30

 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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 Sec. 1.3

More general optimization

• e.g.,
(madding OR crowd) AND
(ignoble OR strife)
• Get document frequencies for all terms.
• Estimate the size of each OR by the sum of its
document frequencies (conservative).
• Process in increasing order of OR sizes.

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Exercise
• Recommend a query processing order for
Term Freq
eyes 213,312
(tangerine OR trees) AND
kaleidoscope 87,009
(marmalade OR skies) AND marmalade 107,913
(kaleidoscope OR eyes) skies 271,658
tangerine 46,653
trees 316,812

• Which two terms should we process first?

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Query processing exercises
• Exercise: If the query is friends AND romans AND
(NOT countrymen), how could we use the freq of
countrymen?
• Exercise: Extend the merge to an arbitrary
Boolean query. Can we always guarantee
execution in time linear in the total postings size?
• Hint: Begin with the case of a Boolean formula
query: in this, each query term appears only once
in the query.
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 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
 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.
 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!

 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
 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.>
 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
 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

 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
 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.
 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
 Sec. 2.4.2

Rules of thumb
• A positional index is 2–4x 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
 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
IR vs. databases:
Structured vs unstructured data
• Structured data tends to refer to information
in “tables”
Employee Manager Salary
Smith Jones 50,000
Chang Smith 60,000
Ivy Smith 50,000

Typically allows numerical range and exact match

(for text) queries, e.g.,
Salary < 60000 AND Manager = Smith.
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Unstructured data
• Typically refers to free text
• Allows
– Keyword queries including operators
– More sophisticated “concept” queries e.g.,
• find all web pages dealing with drug abuse
• Classic model for searching text documents

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Semi-structured data
• In fact almost no data is “unstructured”
• E.g., this slide has distinctly identified zones such
as the Title and Bullets
• … to say nothing of linguistic structure
• Facilitates “semi-structured” search such as
– Title contains data AND Bullets contain search
• Or even
– Title is about Object Oriented Programming AND
Author something like stro*rup
– where * is the wild-card operator

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