Introduction to Information Retrieval
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
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).
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Boolean Retrieval
Boolean retrieval model is model for informtion retrieval in which we can pose
many query which is in the form of boolean expressions of terms, that is, in which
term combined with the operators AND,OR,and NOT
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 those
containing Calpurnia?
Why is that not the answer?
Slow (for large corpora)
Ranked retrieval (best documents to return)
• The way to avoid linearly scanning the text for each query is to index the
document in advance.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Term-document incidence matrix
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
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Incidence vectors
So we have a 0/1 vector for each term.
To answer query: take the vectors for Brutus, Caesar and
Calpurnia, complement the last, and then do a bitwise AND.
110100 AND 110111 AND 101111 = 100100.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Answers to query
Answer 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
Basic assumptions of Information Retrieval
Collection: Fixed set of documents
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
How good are the retrieved docs?
Precision : Fraction of retrieved docs that are relevant to
user’s information need
Recall : Fraction of relevant docs in collection that are
retrieved
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
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.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
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.(1M x 1000)
matrix is extremely sparse. Why?
What’s a better representation?
We only record the 1 positions.
This idea is central to the first major concept in
information retrieval, the inverted index.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Inverted index
For each term t, we must store a list of all documents
that contain t.
Identify each by a docID, a document serial number
Can we used 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?
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
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
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
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
Introduction to Information Retrieval
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
Indexer steps: Sort
Sort by terms
And then docID
Core indexing step
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Indexer steps: Dictionary & Postings
Multiple term
entries in a single
document are
merged.
Split into Dictionary
and Postings
Doc. frequency
information is
added.
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Where do we pay in storage?
Lists of
docIDs
Terms
and
counts
Pointers 17
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Processing the Boolean Queries
How do we process a query using an inverted index
and basic Boolean retrieval model?
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
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:
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
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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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Intersecting two postings lists (a “merge” algorithm)
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Query processing: OR
Implementation (brutus OR calpurnia)
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
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 people still use are Boolean:
Email, library catalog, Mac OS X Spotlight
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
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 26
Introduction to Information Retrieval
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
More general optimization
e.g., (madding OR crowd) AND (ignoble OR strife) AND (killed
OR slain)
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
Exercise
Recommend a query
processing order for
Term Freq
(tangerine OR trees) AND eyes 213312
(marmalade OR skies) AND kaleidoscope 87009
(kaleidoscope OR eyes) marmalade 107913
skies 271658
tangerine 46653
trees 316812
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Ranking search results
Boolean queries give inclusion or exclusion of docs.
Often we want to rank/group results
Need to measure proximity from query to each doc.
Need to decide whether docs presented to user are
singletons, or a group of docs covering various aspects of
the query.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
The web and its challenges
Unusual and diverse documents
Unusual and diverse users, queries, information
needs
Beyond terms, exploit ideas from social networks
link analysis, clickstreams ...
How do search engines work? And how can we
make them better?
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
More sophisticated information retrieval
Cross-language information retrieval
Question answering
Summarization
Text mining
…
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