Information Retrieval and Web Search

Salvatore Orlando

Bing Liu. Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents,

and Usage Data. Springer-Verlag, 2006

Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich

Schtze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge
University Press. 2008
(http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.html)
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 1
 Introduction

Text mining refers to data mining using text

documents as data.
Most text mining tasks use Information Retrieval
(IR) methods to pre-process text documents.
These methods are quite different from traditional
data pre-processing methods used for relational
tables.

Web search also has its root in IR.

First, discuss the feature of the Web data

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 2

 Web
Web:
A huge, widely-distributed, highly heterogeneous, semistructured,,
interconnected, evolving, hypertext/hypermedia information
repository

Main issues
Abundance of information
The 99% of all the information are not interesting for the 99% of all
users
The static Web is a very small part of all the Web
Dynamic Website
To access the Web user need to exploit Search Engines (SE)
SE must be improved
To help people to better formulate their information needs
More personalization is needed

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 3

 Web: Trends and Features

Such numbers represent an estimation of minimum size of Internet.

The websites are many more, while the number of pages is almost
endless

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 4

 Web: Trends and Features
Google in July 2007 announced to have identified 1 trillion
(1012) of unique pages/URLs in the Web
After removing duplicates (about 30%-40%) !!!
Estimated growth: several billions of pages per day
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-
was-big.html
Note that many pages are dynamically created . and this
introduces complexity for systems like Google
Think about a Web calendar on the Web . and a link to next
month we can follow this link a unbounded number of times, by
creating always new pages

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 5

 Web: Trends and Features

How many disks for all the

Web pages?
Consider only the text (HTML)
On the average, 10K Byte
Considering a trillion of pages
about 1016 Byte
Using Hard Disks of 1 Terabyte (about 1012 bytes)
About 10.000 disks L
Things make worse if we consider multimedia data

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 6

 Web: Trends and Features

Besides the grows of the page number, the pages

are also continuosly updated or removed
About the 23% of all the pages are modified daily
In the .com domain, this percentage rises to 40%
On the average, after 10 days, half of the new pages are
removed
Their URL are no longer valid

A. Arasu et al., Searching the Web, ACM Transaction on Internet Technology,

1(1), 2001. Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 7
 Web: Trends and Features
The structure of the Web
network/graph (Bow-tie )

28% of all the pages

Core of the network
Important pages
highly interconnected
with each other

22% of all the pages

reachable from the core,
but not vice versa

The rest of the pages are disconnected from the network core

Andrei Broder, et al. Graph structure in the web: experiments and models 9th WWW, 2000.
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 8
 Web: Trends and Features

Power law
The degree of a node is
the number of
incoming/outgoing
links
If we call k the degree
of a node, a scale-free
network is defined by
the power-law, which
corresponds to this
distribution:
log(frequency)
80%
Most of the nodes are
poorly interconnected
log(degree)
Andrei Broder, et al. Graph structure in the web: experiments and models 9th WWW, 2000.
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 9
The Power law (Long Tail) is ubiquitous in the Web

Contents
Words in the pages (frequency of words): the most common
words are very popular, but there is a long tail of infrequent
words!
Structure
In-degrees / Out-degrees / Numbers of pages per website
Usage patterns
Numbers of visitors
Query/Terms submitted by users of Search Engine

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Long Tail in retail: product popularity (songs)

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 Information Retrieval (IR)

IR helps users find information that matches their

information needs expressed as queries
Historically, IR is about document retrieval,
emphasizing document as the basic unit.
Finding documents relevant to user queries

Technically, IR studies the acquisition, organization,

storage, retrieval, and distribution of information.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 12

IR architecture

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 13

 IR queries

Keyword queries
Boolean queries (using AND, OR, NOT)
Phrase queries
Proximity queries
Full document queries
Natural language questions

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 14

 Information retrieval models

An IR model governs how a document and a query

are represented and how the relevance of a
document to a user query is defined

Main models:
Boolean model
Vector space model
Statistical language model
etc

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 15

 Boolean model

Each document or query is treated as a bag of words

or terms
Ordering of words is not considered

Given a collection of documents D, let

V = {t1, t2, ..., t|V|}
be the set of distinctive words/terms in the collection.
V is called the vocabulary

A weight wij > 0 is associated with each term ti of

a document dj D
wij = 0/1 (absence/presence)
dj = (w1j, w2j, ..., w|V|j)

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 16

 Boolean model (contd)

Query terms are combined logically using the Boolean

operators AND, OR, and NOT.
E.g., ((data AND mining) AND (NOT text))

Retrieval
Given a Boolean query, the system retrieves every
document that makes the query logically true
Exact match

The retrieval results are usually quite poor because

term frequency is not considered.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 17

 Boolean model: an Example

Consider a document space defined by three terms,

i.e., the vocabulary / lexicon:
hardware, software, users
A set of documents is defined as:
A1=(1, 0, 0), A2=(0, 1, 0), A3=(0, 0, 1)
A4=(1, 1, 0), A5=(1, 0, 1), A6=(0, 1, 1)
A7=(1, 1, 1) A8=(1, 0, 1), A9=(0, 1, 1)
If the query is: hardware, software
i.e., (1, 1, 0)
what documents should be retrieved?
AND: documents A4, A7
OR: all documents, but A3

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 18

 Similarity matching: an Example

A set of documents is defined as:

A1=(1, 0, 0), A2=(0, 1, 0), A3=(0, 0, 1)
A4=(1, 1, 0), A5=(1, 0, 1), A6=(0, 1, 1)
A7=(1, 1, 1) A8=(1, 0, 1), A9=(0, 1, 1)
In similarity matching (cosine in the Boolean vector
space):
q=(1, 1, 0)
S(q, A1)=0.71, S(q, A2)=0.71, S(q, A3)=0
S(q, A4)=1, S(q, A5)=0.5, S(q, A6)=0.5
S(q, A7)=0.82, S(q, A8)=0.5, S(q, A9)=0.5
Document retrieved set (with ranking, where cosine>0):
{A4, A7, A1, A2, A5, A6, A8, A9}

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 19

 Vector space model

Documents are still treated as a bag of words or

terms.
Each document is still represented as a vector.
However, the term weights are not forced to be 0 or 1,
like in the Boolean model
Each term weight is computed on the basis of some variations
of TF or TF-IDF scheme.

Term Frequency (TF) Scheme: The weight of a term ti in

document dj is the number of times that ti appears in dj,
denoted by fij. Normalization may also be applied.

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 TF-IDF term weighting scheme

The most well known

weighting scheme
TF: term frequency
IDF: inverse document
frequency.
N: total number of docs
dfi: the number of docs
where ti appears

The final TF-IDF term

weight is:

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 21

 Retrieval in vector space model

Query q is represented in the same way or slightly

differently.
Relevance of di to q: Compare the similarity of
query q and document di, i.e. the similarity between
the two associated vectors.

Cosine similarity (the cosine of the angle

between the two normalized vectors)

Cosine is also commonly used in text clustering

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 22
 Retrieval in the vector space model

Not only documents dj D, but also queries q are

represented as a vector of weigths of |V| elements:
dj =(w1j, w2j, ..., w|V|j) q =(w1q, w2q, ..., w|V|j)

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 23

23
 Retrieval in the vector space model

Rilevance of di w.r.t. q: Compare the similarity of query q

and document di, i.e., the similarity between the two
associated vectors
Cosine similarity (the cosine of the angle)

Example with two

2-dimensional vectors

|V| = 2
24
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 24
 Relevance feedback

Relevance feedback is one of the techniques for

improving retrieval effectiveness. The steps:
the user first identifies some relevant (Dr) and irrelevant
documents (Dir) in the initial list of retrieved documents
goal: expand the query vector in order to maximize similarity
with relevant documents, while minimizing similarity with
irrelevant documents
query q expanded by extracting additional terms from the sample
of relevant (Dr) and irrelevant (Dir) documents to produce qe

perform a second round of retrieval

Rocchio method (, and are parameters)

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 25
 Rocchio text classifier

Training set: relevant and irrelevant docs

you can train a classifier

The Rocchio classification method, can be used to

improve retrieval effectiveness too
Rocchio classifier is constructed by producing a
prototype vector ci for each class i (relevant or
irrelevant in this case) associated with document
set Di:

Each
vector is
normalized
(sz=1)
In classification, cosine is used
the class is determined by the closest class prototype
(1NN) Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 26
 Text pre-processing

Document parsing for word (term) extraction: easy

Stopwords removal
Stemming
Frequency counts and computing TF-IDF term
weights.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 27

 Stopwords removal

Many of the most frequently used words in English are useless

in IR and text mining these words are called stop words
the, of, and, to, .
Typically about 400 to 500 such words
For an application, an additional domain specific stopwords
list may be constructed
Why do we need to remove stopwords?
Reduce indexing (or data) file size
stopwords accounts 20-30% of total word counts.
Improve efficiency and effectiveness
stopwords are not useful for searching or text mining
they may also confuse the retrieval system
Current Web Search Engines generally do not use stopword
lists for phrase search queries

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 28

 Stemming

Techniques used to find out the root/stem of a

word. e.g.,
user engineering
users engineered
used engineer
using
use stem engineer stem
Usefulness:
improving effectiveness of IR and text mining
Matching similar words
Mainly improve recall
reducing indexing size
combing words with the same roots may reduce indexing
size as much as 40-50%
Web Search Engine may need to index un-stemmed words
too for phrase search
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 29
 Basic stemming methods

Using a set of rules. e.g., English rules

remove ending
if a word ends with a consonant other than s,
followed by an s, then delete s.
if a word ends in es, drop the s.
if a word ends in ing, delete the ing unless the remaining
word consists only of one letter or of th.
If a word ends with ed, preceded by a consonant, delete
the ed unless this leaves only a single letter.
...
transform words
if a word ends with ies, but not eies or aies, then
ies y
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 30
 Evaluation: Precision and Recall

Given a query:
Are all retrieved documents relevant?
Have all the relevant documents been retrieved?
Measures for system performance:
The first question is about the precision of the search

The second is about the completeness (recall) of the search

By increasing the number of retrieved items, we usually

increase the recall, but also reduce precision
see next slide, where we plot recall vs. precision, obtained by
increasing the size of the result set of a given query Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 31
Precision-recall curve

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 32

Compare different retrieval algorithms

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 33

 Compare with multiple queries

Compute the average precision at each recall level

Draw precision recall curves

Do not forget the F-score/F-measure evaluation

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 34

 Rank precision

Compute the precision values at some selected rank

positions.
Mainly used in Web search evaluation

For a Web search engine, we can compute

precisions for the top 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30
returned pages
as the user seldom looks at more than 30 pages
P@5, P@10, P@15, P@20, P@25, P@30

Recall is not very meaningful in Web search.

Why?

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 35

 Inverted index

The inverted index of a document collection is

basically a data structure that
attaches each distinctive term with a list of all
documents that contain the term.
Thus, in retrieval, it takes constant time to
find the documents that contains a query term.
Multiple query terms are also easy handled as we
will see soon.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 36

 An example

DocID, Count,
[position list]

lexicon postings list lexicon postings list

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 37

 Index construction

Easy! See the example,

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 38

 Index compression

Postings lists are ordered by docIDs

Compression instead of docIDs we can compress smaller gaps
between docIDs, thus reducing space requirements for the index
Use a variable number of bit/byte for gap representation
the gaps have a smaller magnitude than docIDs

apple 1,2,3,5 1,1,1,2

pear 2,4,5 2,2,1
tomato 3,5 3,2 dGap0 = docID0
dGapi>0 = docIDi - docID(i-1)

dGap

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 39

 Index compression

Example of compression using Variable Byte econding

7 bits

510= 1012
{
82410= 110 01110002
7 bits

{
21457710= 1101 0001100 01100012

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 40

 Search using inverted index

Given a query q, search has the following steps:

Step 1 (Vocabulary search): find each term/word in q in the
inverted index.
Step 2 (Results merging): Merge results to find documents that
contain all or some of the words/terms in q
AND/OR of postings lists
Step 3 (Rank score computation): To rank the resulting
documents/pages, by using
content-based ranking (e.g. TF-IDF)
link-based ranking Web Search Engine
etc. etc.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 41

 Mission impossible ?

WSE
Crawl and index billions of pages
Answer hundreds of millions of queries
per day
In less than 1 sec. per query

Users
Want to submit short queries (on avg.
2.5 terms), often with orthographic errors
Expect to receive the most relevant
results of the Web
In a blink of eye

In terms of 1990 IR, almost unimaginable

42 Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 42
 Web Search as a huge IR system
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Search

Indexer

The Web

Indexes Ad indexes
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 43
 Different search engines

The real differences between different search

engines are
their index weighting schemes
Including context where terms appear, e.g., title, body,
emphasized words, etc.
their query processing methods (e.g., query
classification, expansion, etc)
their ranking algorithms
few of these are published by any of the search
engine companies. They are tightly guarded
secrets.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 44

Web Search Engines

45 Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 45

Web Search Engines: what do the users search?

The 250 most frequent terms in the famous AOL

query log! Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 46
 Query analysis to evaluate user needs

Informational want to learn about something (~40% / 65%)

Low hemoglobin
Navigational want to go to that page (~25% / 15%)
United Airlines
Transactional want to do something (web-mediated) (~35% /
20%)
Access a service Seattle weather

Downloads Mars surface images

Shop Canon S410

Gray areas
Find a good hub Car rental Brasil
Exploratory search see whats there

A. Z. Broder, A taxonomy of web search, SIGIR Forum, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 310, 2002.
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 47
 Anatomy of a modern Web Search Engine

A. Arasu et al., Searching the Web, ACM Transaction on Internet Technology, 1(1), 2001.
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 48
Crawler

49 Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 49

 Crawler

It is a program that navigates the Web following the

hyperlinks and stores them in a page repository
Design Issues of the Crawl module:
What pages to download
When to refresh
Minimize load on web sites
How to parallelize the process
Page selection during crawling: Importance metric
Given a page P, define how good that page is, on the basis of
several metrics (combination of them):
Popularity driven: Incoming-link counts (or PageRank)
Location driven: Deepness of the page in a site
Usage driven: Click counts of the pages (feedback)
Interest driven: driven from a query, based on the similarity with
page contents (focused crawling)
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 50
Indexer and Page Repository

51 Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 51

 Storage: Page repository

The Page Repository is a scalable storage system for web

pages
Allows the Crawler to store pages
Allows the Indexer and Collection Analysis to retrieve them
Similar to other data storage systems DB or file systems
Does not have to provide some of the other systems
features: transactions, logging, directory.

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 52

 Designing a Distributed Page Repository

Repository designed to work over a cluster of

interconnected nodes
Page distribution across nodes
Uniform distribution any page can be sent to any node
Hash distribution policy hash page ID space into node ID space
Physical organization within a node
Update strategy
batch (Periodically executed)
steady (Run all the time)

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 53

 Indexer and collection analysis modules

The Indexer module creates two indexes:

Text (content) index : Uses Traditional indexing
methods like Inverted Indexing.
Structure (links) index : Uses a directed graph of pages
and links.
Sometimes also creates an inverted graph, in order to
answer queries that ask for all the pages that have
hyperlinks pointing to a given page

The collection analysis module uses the 2 basic indexes

created by the indexer module in order to assemble
Utility Indexes
e.g.: a site index.
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 54
 Indexer: Design Issues and Challenges

Index build must be :

Fast
Economic
(unlike traditional index builds)

Incremental indexing must be supported

Personalization
Storage : compression vs. speed

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 55

 Index partitioning

Partitioning Inverted Files

Local inverted file
each node contains indexes
of a disjoint partition of the
document collection
query is broadcasted and
answers are obtained by
merging local results
Global inverted file
each node is only responsible
for a subset of terms in the
collection
query is selectively sent to the
appropriate nodes only
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 56
Query engine

57 Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 57

Query Engine

Snippet

Decreasing
order of page
importance (ranking)

58 Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 58

 Query engine
The query engine module accepts queries from multitudes of users
and returns the results
Exploits the partitioned index to quickly find the relevant pages
Use Page Repository to prepare the page of the (10) results
snippet construction is query-based
Since the possible results are a huge number, the ranking
module has to order the results according to their relevance
Ranking
not only based on traditional IR content-based approaches
terms may be of poor quality or not relevant
insufficient self-description of user intent
combat spam
Link analysis, e.g. PageRank that exploits incoming links
from important pages to raise the rank of pages
Exploit proximity of query terms in the pages
Learning to rank
Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 59
 Summary

We only gave a VERY brief introduction to IR.

There are a large number of other topics, e.g.,
Statistical language model
Latent semantic indexing (LSI and SVD).
Many other interesting topics are not covered, e.g.,
Web search
Index compression
Ranking: combining contents and hyperlinks (see the next
block of slides)
Web page pre-processing
Combining multiple rankings and meta search
Web spamming
Read the textbooks

Data and Web Mining. - S. Orlando 60