Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Document ingestion
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Recall the basic indexing pipeline

Documents Friends, Romans, countrymen.
to
be indexed
Tokenize
r
Token Friends Romans Countrymen
stream
Linguistic
modules
Modified friend roman countryman
tokens Indexe
friend 2 4
r
roman 1 2
Inverted
index countryman 13 1
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Parsing a document
▪ What format is it in?
▪ pdf/word/excel/html?
▪ What language is it in?
▪ What character set is in use?
▪ (CP1252, UTF-8, …)

• Each of these is a classification problem.

• But these tasks are often done

heuristically …
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Complications: Format/language
▪ Documents being indexed can include docs from
many different languages
▪ A single index may contain terms from many languages.
▪ Sometimes a document or its components can
contain multiple languages/formats
▪ French email with a German pdf attachment.

▪ There are commercial and open source libraries that

can handle a lot of this stuff
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Complications: What is a document?

We return from our query “documents” but there are
often interesting questions of grain size:

What is a unit document?

▪ A file?
▪ An email? (Perhaps one of many in a single mbox file)
▪ What about an email with 5 attachments?
▪ A group of files (e.g., PPT or LaTeX split over HTML pages)
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Tokenization
▪ Input: “Friends, Romans and Countrymen”
▪ Output: Tokens
▪ Friends
▪ Romans
▪ Countrymen
▪ A token is an instance of a sequence of characters
▪ Each such token is now a candidate for an index
entry, after further processing
▪ But what are valid tokens to emit?
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Tokenization
▪ Issues in tokenization:
▪ Finland’s capital →
Finland AND s? Finlands? Finland’s?
▪ Hewlett-Packard → Hewlett and Packard as two
tokens?
▪ state-of-the-art: break up hyphenated sequence.
▪ co-education
▪ lowercase, lower-case, lower case ?
▪ It can be effective to get the user to put in possible hyphens

▪ San Francisco: one token or two?

▪ How do you decide it is one token?
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Numbers
▪ 3/20/91 Mar. 12, 1991 20/3/91
▪ 55 B.C.
▪ B-52
▪ My PGP key is 324a3df234cb23e
▪ (800) 234-2333
▪ Often have embedded spaces
▪ Older IR systems may not index numbers
▪ But often very useful: think about things like looking up error
codes/stacktraces on the web
▪ (One answer is using n-grams)
▪ Will often index “meta-data” separately
▪ Creation date, format, author etc.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Tokenization: language issues

▪ French
▪ L'ensemble → one token or two?
▪ L ? L’ ? Le ?
▪ Want l’ensemble to match with un ensemble
▪ Until at least 2003, it didn’t on Google
▪ Internationalization!

▪ German noun compounds are not segmented

▪ Lebensversicherungsgesellschaftsangestellter
▪ ‘life insurance company employee’
▪ German retrieval systems benefit greatly from a compound splitter
module
▪ Can give a 15% performance boost for German
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Tokenization: language issues

▪ Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between
words:
▪ 莎拉波娃现在居住在美国东南部的佛罗里达。
▪ Not always guaranteed a unique tokenization
▪ Further complicated in Japanese, with multiple
alphabets intermingled
▪ Dates/amounts in multiple formats
フォーチュン500社は情報不足のため時間あた$500K(約
6,000万円)
Katakan Hiragan Kanj Romaj
a a i i
End-user can express query entirely in
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Tokenization: language issues

▪ Arabic (or Hebrew) is basically written right to left,
but with certain items like numbers written left to
right
▪ Words are separated, but letter forms within a word
form complex ligatures

▪ ← → ←→ ←
start
▪ ‘Algeria achieved its independence in 1962 after 132
years of French occupation.’
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Terms
The things indexed in an IR system
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Stop words
▪ With a stop list, you exclude from the dictionary entirely the
commonest words. Intuition:
▪ They have little semantic content: the, a, and, to, be
▪ There are a lot of them: ~30% of postings for top 30 words
▪ But the trend is away from doing this:
▪ Good compression techniques means the space for including stop words
in a system is very small
▪ Good query optimization techniques mean you pay little at query time
for including stop words.
▪ You need them for:
▪ Phrase queries: “King of Denmark”
▪ Various song titles, etc.: “Let it be”, “To be or not to be”
▪ “Relational” queries: “flights to London”
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Normalization to terms
▪ Token normalization is the process of canonicalizing tokens so that
matches occur despite superficial differences in the character sequences
of the Tokens
▪ We may need to “normalize” words in indexed text as well as query words
into the same form
▪ We want to match U.S.A. and USA
▪ Result is terms: a term is a (normalized) word type, which is an entry in our
IR system dictionary
▪ We most commonly implicitly define equivalence classes of terms by, e.g.,
▪ deleting periods to form a term
▪ U.S.A., USA ⎝ USA
▪ deleting hyphens to form a term
▪ anti-discriminatory, antidiscriminatory ⎝ antidiscriminatory
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Normalization: other languages

▪ Accents: e.g., French résumé vs. resume.
▪ Umlauts (a mark (¨) used as a diacritic over a vowel ): e.g.,
German: Tuebingen vs. Tübingen
▪ Should be equivalent
▪ Most important criterion:
▪ How are your users like to write their queries for these
words?

▪ Even in languages that standardly have accents, users often

may not type them
▪ Often best to normalize to a de-accented term
▪ Tuebingen, Tübingen, Tubingen ⎝ Tubingen
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Case folding
▪ Reduce all letters to lower case
▪ exception: upper case in mid-sentence?
▪ e.g., General Motors
▪ Fed vs. fed
▪ SAIL vs. sail
▪ Often best to lower case everything, since users will use
lowercase regardless of ‘correct’ capitalization…

▪ Longstanding Google example: [fixed in 2011…]

▪ Query C.A.T.
▪ #1 result is for “cats”.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Normalization to terms

▪ An alternative to equivalence classing is to do

asymmetric expansion

▪ An example of where this may be useful

▪ Enter: window Search: window, windows
▪ Enter: windows Search: Windows, windows, window
▪ Enter: Windows Search: Windows
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Thesauri and soundex

▪ Do we handle synonyms and homonyms?
▪ E.g., by hand-constructed equivalence classes
▪ car = automobile color = colour
▪ We can rewrite to form equivalence-class terms
▪ When the document contains automobile, index it under
car-automobile (and vice-versa)
▪ Or we can expand a query
▪ When the query contains automobile, look under car as well
▪ What about spelling mistakes?
▪ One approach is Soundex, which forms equivalence classes
of words based on phonetic heuristics
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Stemming and Lemmatization
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Lemmatization
▪ Lemmatization implies doing “proper” reduction to dictionary headword
form with the use of a vocabulary and morphological analysis of words

▪ Reduce inflectional/variant forms to base form

▪ E.g.,
▪ am, are, is → be
▪ car, cars, car's, cars' → car
▪ the boy's cars are different colors → the boy car be different color
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Stemming
▪ Reduce terms to their “roots” before indexing

▪ “Stemming” suggests crude affix chopping

▪ language dependent
▪ e.g., automate(s), automatic, automation all reduced to automat.

for example compressed for exampl compress and

and compression are both compress ar both accept
accepted as equivalent to as equival to compress
compress.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Porter’s algorithm (PA)

▪ Commonest algorithm for stemming English
▪ Results suggest it’s at least as good as other stemming
options
▪ PA consists of 5 phases of word reductions
▪ phases applied sequentially
▪ each phase consists of a set of commands
▪ sample convention: Of the rules in a compound command,
select the one that applies to the longest suffix.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Typical rules in Porter

▪ sses → ss caresses → caress
▪ ies → I ponies → poni
▪ ational → ate rotational → rotate
▪ tional → tion motivational → motivation
▪ S→ cats → cat
Weight of word sensitive rules
▪ (m>1) EMENT →
▪ replacement → replac
▪ cement → cement
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Other stemmers
▪ Other stemmers exist:
▪ Lovins stemmer
▪ http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/stemming/general/lovins.htm
▪ Single-pass, longest suffix removal (about 250 rules)
▪ Paice/Husk stemmer
▪ Snowball
▪ Rather than using a stemmer, one can use a lemmatizer, a tool
from NLP, that does full morphological analysis to accurately
identify the lemma for each word.
▪ At most modest benefits for retrieval
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Stemmer Example?
Sample text: Such an analysis can reveal features that are not easily 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.

Output:
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

Porter stemmer: such an analysi can reveal featur that ar not easili visibl from the
variat in the individu gene and can lead to a pictur of express that is more biolog
transpar and access to interpret

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
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Does stemming help?

▪ English: very mixed results. Helps recall for some
queries but harms precision on others
▪ E.g., operate, operating, operates, operative, operational
⇒ oper
▪ Definitely useful for Spanish, German, Finnish, …
▪ 30% performance gains for Finnish!
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Faster postings merges:
Skip pointers/Skip lists
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Recall basic merge

▪ Walk through the two postings simultaneously, in
time linear in the total number of postings entries

2 4 8 4 4 6 12 Brutu
2 8 1 8 4 8 s
1 2 3 8 1 17 2 3 Caesa
1 1 1 r
If the list lengths are m and n, the merge takes O(m+n)
operations.

Can we do better?
Yes (if the index isn’t changing too fast).
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Augment postings with skip pointers (at indexing time)

4 12
8
21 4 8 4 4 6 12
1 8 4 8
1 3
11 2 3 8 111 17 2 3
1 1
▪ Why?
▪ To skip postings that will not figure in the search results.
▪ How?
▪ Where do we place skip pointers?
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Query processing with skip pointers

4 12
12 8
4 8 4 4 6 12
1 8 4 8
1 3
1 12 3 8 2 11 3 17
1 1 1
Suppose we’ve stepped through the lists until we process 8 on
each list. We match it and advance.

We then have 41 and 11 on the lower. 11 is smaller.

But the skip successor of 11 on the lower list is 31, so

we can skip ahead past the intervening postings.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Where do we place skips?

▪ Tradeoff:
▪ More skips → shorter skip spans ⇒ more likely to skip.
But lots of comparisons to skip pointers.
▪ Fewer skips → few pointer comparison, but then long skip
spans ⇒ few successful skips.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Postings lists intersection with skip pointers

Introduction to Information Retrieval

Placing skips
▪ Simple heuristic: for postings of length L, use √L evenly-spaced skip
pointers [Moffat and Zobel 1996]

▪ This ignores the distribution of query terms.

▪ Easy if the index is relatively static; harder if L keeps changing because of

updates.

▪ This definitely used to help; with modern hardware it may not unless
you’re memory-based [Bahle et al. 2002]
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Positional postings and phrase queries

▪ Many complex or technical concepts and many organization
and product names are multiword compounds or phrases.

▪ Most recent search engines support a double quotes syntax

(“stanford university”) for phrase queries.

▪ As many as 10% of web queries are phrase queries, and many

more are implicit phrase queries (such as person names),
entered without use of double quotes.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

1. Biword indexes
▪ One approach to handling phrases is to consider every pair of
consecutive terms in a document as a phrase.
For example, the text Friends, Romans, Countrymen would
generate the biwords:
friends romans
romans countrymen
▪ In this model, we treat each of these biwords as a vocabulary
term.
▪ The concept of a biword index can be extended to longer
sequences of words, and if the index includes variable length
word sequences, it is generally referred to as a phrase index.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

2. Positional indexes
▪ A biword index is not the standard solution. Rather, a positional
index is most commonly employed.
▪ Here, for each term in the vocabulary, we store postings of the
form docID: {hposition1, position2, . . . } e.g.
to, 993427:
(1, 6: (7, 18, 33, 72, 86, 231);
2, 5: (1, 17, 74, 222, 255);
4, 5: (8, 16, 190, 429, 433);
5, 2: (363, 367);
7, 3: (13, 23, 191); ..... . . )
be, 178239:
(1, 2: (17, 25);
4, 5: (17, 191, 291, 430, 434);
5, 3: (14, 19, 101); . . . ..)
Introduction to Information Retrieval

2. Positional indexes
▪ To process a phrase query, we still need to access the inverted
index entries for each distinct term.
▪ As before, we would start with the least frequent term and
then work to further restrict the list of possible candidates.

▪ In the merge operation, the same general technique is used as

before, but rather than simply checking that both terms are in a
document, we also need to check that their positions of
appearance in the document are compatible with the phrase
query being evaluated.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Example: Satisfying phrase queries

Suppose the postings lists for ‘to’ and ‘be’ are as in previous slide, and the query is “to
be or not to be”. The postings lists to access are: to, be, or, not. We will examine
intersecting the postings lists for ‘to’ and ‘be’. We first look for documents that
contain both terms. Then, we look for places in the lists where there is an
occurrence of ‘be’ with a token index one higher than a position of ‘to’, and then we
look for another occurrence of each word with token index 4 higher than the first
occurrence. In the above lists, the pattern of occurrences that is a possible match is:

to: (. . . ; 4: (. . . ,429,433); . . . )
be: (. . . ; 4(. . . ,430,434); . . . )