Information Retrieval

and Web Search

Introduction

Information Retrieval
(IR)
• The indexing and retrieval of textual
documents.
• Searching for pages on the World Wide
Web is the “killer app.”
• Concerned firstly with retrieving relevant
documents to a query.
• Concerned secondly with retrieving from
large sets of documents efficiently.

Typical IR Task

• Given:
– A corpus of textual natural-language
documents.
– A user query in the form of a textual string.
• Find:
– A ranked set of documents that are relevant to
the query.

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 IR System

Document
corpus

Query IR
String System

1. Doc1
2. Doc2
Ranked 3. Doc3
Documents .
.

Relevance

• Relevance is a subjective judgment and may

include:
– Being on the proper subject.
– Being timely (recent information).
– Being authoritative (from a trusted source).
– Satisfying the goals of the user and his/her
intended use of the information (information
need).

Keyword Search

• Simplest notion of relevance is that the

query string appears verbatim in the
document.
• Slightly less strict notion is that the words
in the query appear frequently in the
document, in any order (bag of words).

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 Problems with Keywords

• May not retrieve relevant documents that

include synonymous terms.
– “restaurant” vs. “café”
– “PRC” vs. “China”
• May retrieve irrelevant documents that
include ambiguous terms.
– “bat” (baseball vs. mammal)
– “Apple” (company vs. fruit)
– “bit” (unit of data vs. act of eating)
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Beyond Keywords

• We will cover the basics of keyword-based

IR, but…
• We will focus on extensions and recent
developments that go beyond keywords.
• We will cover the basics of building an
efficient IR system, but…
• We will focus on basic capabilities and
algorithms rather than systems issues that
allow scaling to industrial size databases.
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Intelligent IR

• Taking into account the meaning of the

words used.
• Taking into account the order of words in
the query.
• Adapting to the user based on direct or
indirect feedback.
• Taking into account the authority of the
source.

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 IR System Architecture

User Interface
Text
User
Text Operations
Need
Logical View
User Query Database
Feedback Operations Indexing
Manager
Inverted
file
Query Searching Index
Text
Ranked Retrieved Database
Docs Ranking Docs
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IR System Components
• Text Operations forms index words (tokens).
– Stopword removal
– Stemming
• Indexing constructs an inverted index of
word to document pointers.
• Searching retrieves documents that contain a
given query token from the inverted index.
• Ranking scores all retrieved documents
according to a relevance metric.

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IR System Components (continued)

• User Interface manages interaction with the
user:
– Query input and document output.
– Relevance feedback.
– Visualization of results.
• Query Operations transform the query to
improve retrieval:
– Query expansion using a thesaurus.
– Query transformation using relevance feedback.

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 Web Search

• Application of IR to HTML documents on

the World Wide Web.
• Differences:
– Must assemble document corpus by spidering
the web.
– Can exploit the structural layout information
in HTML (XML).
– Documents change uncontrollably.
– Can exploit the link structure of the web.

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Web Search System

Web Spider Document

corpus

Query IR
String System

1. Page1
2. Page2
3. Page3
Ranked
. Documents
.

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Other IR-Related Tasks

• Automated document categorization

• Information filtering (spam filtering)
• Information routing
• Automated document clustering
• Recommending information or products
• Information extraction
• Information integration
• Question answering
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 History of IR

• 1960-70’s:
– Initial exploration of text retrieval systems for
“small” corpora of scientific abstracts, and law
and business documents.
– Development of the basic Boolean and vector-
space models of retrieval.
– Prof. Salton and his students at Cornell
University are the leading researchers in the
area.

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IR History Continued

• 1980’s:
– Large document database systems, many run by
companies:
• Lexis-Nexis
• Dialog
• MEDLINE

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IR History Continued

• 1990’s:
– Searching FTPable documents on the Internet
• Archie
• WAIS
– Searching the World Wide Web
• Lycos
• Yahoo
• Altavista

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 IR History Continued

• 1990’s continued:
– Organized Competitions
• NIST TREC
– Recommender Systems
• Ringo
• Amazon
• NetPerceptions
– Automated Text Categorization & Clustering

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IR History Continued

• 2000’s
– Link analysis for Web Search
• Google
– Automated Information Extraction
– Parallel Processing
• Map/Reduce
– Question Answering
• TREC Q/A track

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IR History Continued

• 2000’s continued:
– Multimedia IR
• Image
• Video
• Audio and music
– Cross-Language IR
• DARPA Tides
– Document Summarization
– Learning to Rank

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 IR History Continued

• 2010’s
– Intelligent Personal Assistants
• Siri
• Cortana
• Google Now
• Alexa
– Complex Question Answering
• IBM Watson
– Distributional Semantics
– Deep Learning
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Recent IR History

• 2020’s
– Large Language Models (LLM’s)
• ELMO
• BERT
• GPT 1, 2, 3
– ChatBots
• ChatGPT, GPT 4
• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
(RLHF)

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Related Areas

• Database Management
• Library and Information Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning

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 Database Management

• Focused on structured data stored in

relational tables rather than free-form text.
• Focused on efficient processing of well-
defined queries in a formal language (SQL).
• Clearer semantics for both data and queries.
• Recent move towards semi-structured data
(XML) brings it closer to IR.

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Library and Information Science

• Focused on the human user aspects of

information retrieval (human-computer
interaction, user interface, visualization).
• Concerned with effective categorization of
human knowledge.
• Concerned with citation analysis and
bibliometrics (structure of information).
• Recent work on digital libraries brings it
closer to CS & IR.
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Artificial Intelligence

• Focused on the representation of knowledge,

reasoning, and intelligent action.
• Formalisms for representing knowledge and
queries:
– First-order Predicate Logic
– Bayesian Networks
• Recent work on web ontologies and
intelligent information agents brings it
closer to IR.
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 Natural Language Processing

• Focused on the syntactic, semantic, and

pragmatic analysis of natural language text
and discourse.
• Ability to analyze syntax (phrase structure)
and semantics could allow retrieval based
on meaning rather than keywords.

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Natural Language Processing:

IR Directions
• Methods for determining the sense of an
ambiguous word based on context (word
sense disambiguation).
• Methods for identifying specific pieces of
information in a document (information
extraction).
• Methods for answering specific NL
questions from document corpora or
structured data like FreeBase or Google’s
Knowledge Graph.
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Machine Learning

• Focused on the development of

computational systems that improve their
performance with experience.
• Automated classification of examples
based on learning concepts from labeled
training examples (supervised learning).
• Automated methods for clustering
unlabeled examples into meaningful
groups (unsupervised learning).
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 Machine Learning:
IR Directions
• Text Categorization
– Automatic hierarchical classification (Yahoo).
– Adaptive filtering/routing/recommending.
– Automated spam filtering.
• Text Clustering
– Clustering of IR query results.
– Automatic formation of hierarchies (Yahoo).
• Learning for Information Extraction
• Text Mining
• Learning to Rank 31

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