Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval

The term vocabulary and postings lists

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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Overview
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Inverted Index

For each term t, we store a list of all documents that contain t.

dictionary postings
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Intersecting two posting lists

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Constructing the inverted index: Sort postings

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Westlaw: Example queries

Information need: Information on the legal theories involved in
preventing the disclosure of trade secrets by employees formerly
employed by a competing company Query: “trade secret” /s
disclos! /s prevent /s employe! Information need: Requirements

for disabled people to be able to access a workplace Query:

disab! /p access! /s work-site work-place (employment /3 place)

Information need: Cases about a host’s responsibility for drunk

guests Query: host! /p (responsib! liab!) /p (intoxicat! drunk!)
/p guest

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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Does Google use the Boolean model?

 On Google, the default interpretation of a query [w1 w2 . . .wn]
is w1 AND w2 AND . . .AND wn
 Cases where you get hits that do not contain one of the wi :
 anchor text
 page contains variant of wi (morphology, spelling correction,
synonym)
 long queries (n large)
 boolean expression generates very few hits
 Simple Boolean vs. Ranking of result set
 Simple Boolean retrieval returns matching documents in no
particular order.
 Google (and most well designed Boolean engines) rank the result
set – they rank good hits (according to some estimator of
relevance) higher than bad hits.
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Take-away

 Understanding of the basic unit of classical information

retrieval systems: words and documents: What is a document,
what is a term?
 Tokenization: how to get from raw text to words (or tokens)
 More complex indexes: skip pointers and phrases

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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Documents

 Last lecture: Simple Boolean retrieval system

 Our assumptions were:
 We know what a document is.
 We can “machine-read” each document.
 This can be complex in reality.

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Parsing a document

 We need to deal with format and language of each document.

 What format is it in? pdf, word, excel, html etc.
 What language is it in?
 What character set is in use?
 Each of these is a classification problem, which we will study
later in this course (IIR 13).
 Alternative: use heuristics

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Format/Language: Complications
 A single index usually contains terms of several languages.
 Sometimes a document or its components contain multiple
languages/formats.
 French email with Spanish pdf attachment
 What is the document unit for indexing?
 A file?
 An email?
 An email with 5 attachments?
 A group of files (ppt or latex in HTML)?
 Upshot: Answering the question “what is a document?” is not
trivial and requires some design decisions.
 Also: XML
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Definitions

 Word – A delimited string of characters as it appears in the

text.
 Term – A “normalized” word (case, morphology, spelling etc);
an equivalence class of words.
 All terms are words, but not all words are terms.
 Token – An instance of a word or term occurring in a
document.
 Type – The same as a term in most cases: an equivalence class
of tokens.

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Normalization
 Need to “normalize” terms in indexed text as well as query
terms into the same form.
 Example: We want to match U.S.A. and USA
 We most commonly implicitly define equivalence classes of
terms.
 Alternatively: do asymmetric expansion
 window → window, windows
 windows → Windows, windows
 Windows (no expansion)
 More powerful, but less efficient
 Why don’t you want to put window, Window, windows, and
Windows in the same equivalence class?

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Normalization: Other languages

 Normalization and language detection interact.

 PETER WILL NICHT MIT. → MIT = mit
 He got his PhD from MIT. → MIT ≠ mit

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Recall: Inverted index construction

 Input:

 Output:

 Each token is a candidate for a postings entry.

 What are valid tokens to emit?

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Exercises

In June, the dog likes to chase the cat in the barn. – How many
word tokens? How many word types? Why tokenization is difficult

– even in English. Tokenize: Mr. O’Neill thinks that the boys’

stories about Chile’s capital aren’t amusing.

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Tokenization problems: One word or two? (or

several)
 Hewlett-Packard
 State-of-the-art
 co-education
 the hold-him-back-and-drag-him-away maneuver
 data base
 San Francisco
 Los Angeles-based company
 cheap San Francisco-Los Angeles fares
 York University vs. New York University

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Numbers
 3/20/91
 20/3/91
 Mar 20, 1991
 B-52
 100.2.86.144
 (800) 234-2333
 800.234.2333
 Older IR systems may not index numbers . . .
 . . . but generally it’s a useful feature.

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Chinese: No whitespace

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Ambiguous segmentation in Chinese

The two characters can be treated as one word meaning

‘monk’ or as a sequence of two words meaning ‘and’ and ‘still’.

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Other cases of “no whitespace”

 Compounds in Dutch, German, Swedish

 Computerlinguis k → Computer + Linguis k
 Lebensversicherungsgesellschaftsangestellter
 → leben + versicherung + gesellschaft + angestellter
 Inuit: tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga (I can’t hear very well.)
 Many other languages with segmentation difficulties: Finnish,
Urdu, . . .

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Japanese

4 different “alphabets”: Chinese characters, hiragana syllabary

for inflectional endings and functional words, katakana
syllabary for transcription of foreign words and other uses,
and latin. No spaces (as in Chinese). End user can express
query entirely in hiragana!

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Arabic script

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Arabic script: Bidirectionality

← → ← → ← START
‘Algeria achieved its independence in 1962 after 132 years of French occupation.’

Bidirectionality is not a problem if text is coded in Unicode.

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Accents and diacritics

 Accents: résumé vs. resume (simple omission of accent)

 Umlauts: Universität vs. Universitaet (substitution with special
letter sequence “ae”)
 Most important criterion: How are users likely to write their
queries for these words?
 Even in languages that standardly have accents, users often do
not type them. (Polish?)

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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Case folding

 Reduce all letters to lower case

 Possible exceptions: capitalized words in mid-sentence
 MIT vs. mit
 Fed vs. fed
 It’s often best to lowercase everything since users will use
lowercase regardless of correct capitalization.

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Stop words

 stop words = extremely common words which would appear

to be of little value in helping select documents matching a
user need
 Examples: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, he, in,
is, it, its, of, on, that, the, to, was, were, will, with
 Stop word elimination used to be standard in older IR
systems.
 But you need stop words for phrase queries, e.g. “King of
Denmark”
 Most web search engines index stop words.

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More equivalence classing

 Soundex: IIR 3 (phonetic equivalence, Muller = Mueller)

 Thesauri: IIR 9 (semantic equivalence, car = automobile)

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Lemmatization

 Reduce inflectional/variant forms to base form

 Example: am, are, is → be
 Example: car, cars, car’s, cars’ → car
 Example: the boy’s cars are different colors → the boy car be
different color
 Lemmatization implies doing “proper” reduction to
dictionary headword form (the lemma).
 Inflectional morphology (cu ng → cut) vs. derivational
morphology (destruction → destroy)

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Stemming

 Definition of stemming: Crude heuristic process that chops

off the ends of words in the hope of achieving what
“principled” lemmatization attempts to do with a lot of
linguistic knowledge.
 Language dependent
 Often inflectional and derivational
 Example for derivational: automate, automatic, automation
all reduce to automat

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Porter algorithm
 Most common algorithm for stemming English
 Results suggest that it is at least as good as other stemming
options
 Conventions + 5 phases of reductions
 Phases are applied sequentially
 Each phase consists of a set of commands.
 Sample command: Delete final ement if what remains is longer
than 1 character
 replacement → replac
 cement → cement
 Sample convention: Of the rules in a compound command,
select the one that applies to the longest suffix.
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Porter stemmer: A few rules

Rule Example
SSES → SS caresses → caress
IES → I ponies → poni
SS → SS caress → caress
S→ cats → cat

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Three stemmers: A comparison

Sample text: Such an analysis can reveal features that are not easil
visible from the variations in the individual genes and
can lead to a picture of expression that is more
biologically transparent and accessible to interpretation
Porter stemmer: such an analysi can reveal featur that ar not easili visibl
from the variat in the individu gene and can lead to
pictur of express that is more biolog transpar and
access to interpret
Lovins stemmer: such an analys can reve featur that ar not eas vis from
th vari in th individu gen and can lead to a pictur of
expres that is mor biolog transpar and acces to
interpres
Paice stemmer: such an analys can rev feat that are not easy vis from
the vary in the individ gen and can lead to a pict of
express that is mor biolog transp and access to interpret
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Does stemming improve effectiveness?

 In general, stemming increases effectiveness for some
queries, and decreases effectiveness for others.
 Queries where stemming is likely to help: [tartan sweaters],
[sightseeing tour san francisco] (equivalence classes:
{sweater,sweaters}, {tour,tours})
 Porter Stemmer equivalence class oper contains all of
operate operating operates operation operative operatives
operational.
 Queries where stemming hurts: [operational AND research],
[operating AND system], [operative AND dentistry]

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Exercise: What does Google do?

 Stop words
 Normalization
 Tokenization
 Lowercasing
 Stemming
 Non-latin alphabets
 Umlauts
 Compounds
 Numbers

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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Recall basic intersection algorithm

 Linear in the length of the postings lists.

 Can we do better?

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Skip pointers

 Skip pointers allow us to skip postings that will not figure in

the search results.
 This makes intersecting postings lists more efficient.
 Some postings lists contain several million entries – so
efficiency can be an issue even if basic intersection is linear.
 Where do we put skip pointers?
 How do we make sure intersection results are correct?

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Basic idea

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Skip lists: Larger example

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Intersection with skip pointers

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Where do we place skips?

 Tradeoff: number of items skipped vs. frequency skip can be

taken
 More skips: Each skip pointer skips only a few items, but we
can frequently use it.
 Fewer skips: Each skip pointer skips many items, but we can
not use it very often.

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Where do we place skips? (cont)

 Simple heuristic: for postings list of length P, use

evenly-spaced skip pointers.
 This ignores the distribution of query terms.
 Easy if the index is static; harder in a dynamic environment
because of updates.
 How much do skip pointers help?
 They used to help a lot.
 With today’s fast CPUs, they don’t help that much anymore.

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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Outline
❶ Recap

❷ Documents
❸ Terms
 General + Non-English
 English

❹ Skip pointers

❺ Phrase queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

Phrase queries
 We want to answer a query such as [stanford university] – as
a phrase.
 Thus The inventor Stanford Ovshinsky never went to
university should not be a match.
 The concept of phrase query has proven easily understood by
users.
 About 10% of web queries are phrase queries.
 Consequence for inverted index: it no longer suffices to store
docIDs in postings lists.
 Two ways of extending the inverted index:
 biword index
 positional index
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Biword indexes

 Index every consecutive pair of terms in the text as a phrase.

 For example, Friends, Romans, Countrymen would generate
two biwords: “friends romans” and “romans countrymen”
 Each of these biwords is now a vocabulary term.
 Two-word phrases can now easily be answered.

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Longer phrase queries

 A long phrase like “stanford university palo alto” can be

represented as the Boolean query “STANFORD UNIVERSITY” AND
“UNIVERSITY PALO” AND “PALO ALTO”
 We need to do post-filtering of hits to identify subset that
actually contains the 4-word phrase.

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Extended biwords
 Parse each document and perform part-of-speech tagging
 Bucket the terms into (say) nouns (N) and
articles/prepositions (X)
 Now deem any string of terms of the form NX*N to be an
extended biword
 Examples: catcher in the rye
N X X N
king of Denmark
N X N
 Include extended biwords in the term vocabulary
 Queries are processed accordingly
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Issues with biword indexes

 Why are biword indexes rarely used?

 False positives, as noted above
 Index blowup due to very large term vocabulary

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Positional indexes

 Positional indexes are a more efficient alternative to biword

indexes.
 Postings lists in a nonpositional index: each posting is just a
docID
 Postings lists in a positional index: each posting is a docID and
a list of positions

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Positional indexes: Example

Query: “to1 be2 or3 not4 to5 be6” TO, 993427:
‹ 1: ‹7, 18, 33, 72, 86, 231›;
2: ‹1, 17, 74, 222, 255›;
4: ‹8, 16, 190, 429, 433›;
5: ‹363, 367›;
7: ‹13, 23, 191›; . . . ›
BE, 178239:
‹ 1: ‹17, 25›;
4: ‹17, 191, 291, 430, 434›;
5: ‹14, 19, 101›; . . . › Document 4 is a match!

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Proximity search
 We just saw how to use a positional index for phrase
searches.
 We can also use it for proximity search.
 For example: employment /4 place
 Find all documents that contain EMPLOYMENT and PLACE within
4 words of each other.
 Employment agencies that place healthcare workers are
seeing growth is a hit.
 Employment agencies that have learned to adapt now place
healthcare workers is not a hit.

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Proximity search

 Use the positional index

 Simplest algorithm: look at cross-product of positions of (i)
EMPLOYMENT in document and (ii) PLACE in document
 Very inefficient for frequent words, especially stop words
 Note that we want to return the actual matching positions,
not just a list of documents.
 This is important for dynamic summaries etc.

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“Proximity” intersection

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Combination scheme
 Biword indexes and positional indexes can be profitably
combined.
 Many biwords are extremely frequent: Michael Jackson,
Britney Spears etc
 For these biwords, increased speed compared to positional
postings intersection is substantial.
 Combination scheme: Include frequent biwords as vocabulary
terms in the index. Do all other phrases by positional
intersection.
 Williams et al. (2004) evaluate a more sophisticated mixed
indexing scheme. Faster than a positional index, at a cost of
26% more space for index.
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“Positional” queries on Google

 For web search engines, positional queries are much more

expensive than regular Boolean queries.
 Let’s look at the example of phrase queries.
 Why are they more expensive than regular Boolean queries?
 Can you demonstrate on Google that phrase queries are
more expensive than Boolean queries?

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Take-away

 Understanding of the basic unit of classical information

retrieval systems: words and documents: What is a
document, what is a term?
 Tokenization: how to get from raw text to words (or tokens)
 More complex indexes: skip pointers and phrases

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Resources

 Chapter 2 of IIR
 Resources at http://ifnlp.org/ir
 Porter stemmer

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