Lect 2: Boolean Retrieval

Dr. Subrat Kumar Nayak

Associate Professor
Department of CSE, ITER, SOADu
Boolean Retrieval Model
 The Boolean retrieval model is a model for information retrieval in
which we can pose any query which is in the form of a Boolean
expression of terms, that is, in which terms are combined with the
operators AND, OR, and NOT.
 The model views each document as just a set of words.
 Queries are Boolean expressions, e.g., CAESAR AND BRUTUS
 The search engine returns all documents that satisfy the Boolean
expression.
 A sort of linear scan through documents.
Boolean Retrieval: Grepping
 The simplest form of document retrieval is for a computer to do linear scan through
documents. This process is commonly referred to as grepping through text.
 Names after the Unix command grep, which performs this process.
 Grepping through text can be a very effective process, especially given the speed of
modern computers
 Often this allows useful possibilities for wild card pattern matching through the use of
regular expressions.
Example:
 Suppose you wanted to determine which document contain the words Information AND
Retrieval AND NOT Boolean
 One way to do that is to start at the beginning and to read through all the text, noting for
each document whether it contains Information and Retrieval and excluding it from
consideration if it contains Boolean.
 This process is commonly referred to as grepping through text
Boolean Retrieval: Grepping
 But for many purposes, you do need more:
❑ To process large document collections quickly. The amount of online data has
grown at least as quickly as the speed of computers, and we would now like to be
able to search collections that total in the order of billions to trillions of words.
❑ To allow more flexible matching operations. For example, it is impractical to
perform the query Romans NEAR countrymen with grep, where NEAR might be
defined as “within 5 words” or “within the same sentence”.
❑ To allow ranked retrieval: in many cases you want the best answer to an
information need among many documents that contain certain words.
Unstructured data in 1620
 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 lines containing Calpurnia?
 Why is that not the answer?
Slow (for large corpora)
NOT Calpurnia is non-trivial
Other operations (e.g., find the word Romans near countrymen)
not feasible
Ranked retrieval (best documents to return)
Later lectures
Boolean Retrieval: Some terminology
 Documents: documents means whatever units we have decided to
build a retrieval system over. They might be individual memos or
chapters of a book.
 Collection/ Corpus: We will refer to the group of documents over
which we perform retrieval as the (document) collection. It is
sometimes also referred to as a corpus (a body of texts).

Let us consider Shakespeare’s Collected Works, and use it to

introduce the basics of the Boolean retrieval model.
 Boolean Retrieval: Term-document
incidence matrices
 The way to avoid linearly scanning the texts for each query is to index the documents in
advance.
 The binary term-document incidence matrix, is an outcome of recording each document
– here a play of Shakespeare’s – whether it contains each word out of all the words
Shakespeare used (Shakespeare used about 32,000 different words)
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
Boolean Retrieval: Incidence vectors
 So we have a 0/1 vector for each term.
 To answer query: take the vectors for Brutus, Caesar and Calpurnia
(complemented) ➔ bitwise AND.
110100 AND
110111 AND
101111 =
100100 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
Answers 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.
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.
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. Why?

matrix is extremely sparse.

 What’s a better representation?

We only record the 1 positions.