CI-6226

Lecture 5. Scoring, Term

Weighting, Vector Space Model.
Part 2
Information Retrieval and Analysis

Vasily Sidorov

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Agenda
▪ Speeding up vector space ranking
▪ Putting together a complete search
system
▪ Will require learning about a number of
miscellaneous topics and heuristics

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Computing cosine scores

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Efficient cosine ranking
▪ Find the K docs in the collection “nearest” to the
query  K largest query-doc cosines
▪ Efficient ranking:
▪ Computing a single cosine efficiently
▪ Choosing the K largest cosine values efficiently
▪ Can we do this without computing all N cosines?

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 Sec. 7.1

Efficient cosine ranking

▪ What we’re doing in effect: solving the K-nearest
neighbor problem for a query vector
▪ In general, we do not know how to do this efficiently
for high-dimensional spaces
▪ But it is solvable for short queries, and standard
indexes support this well

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 Sec. 7.1

Special case – unweighted queries

▪ No weighting on query terms
▪ Assume each query term occurs only once
▪ Then for ranking, don’t need to normalize query
vector
▪ Slight simplification of the algorithm

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 Sec. 7.1

Computing the K largest cosines:

selection vs. sorting
▪ Typically we want to retrieve the top K docs (in the
cosine ranking for the query)
▪ not to totally order all docs in the collection
▪ Can we pick off docs with K highest cosines?
▪ Let J = number of docs with nonzero cosines
▪ We seek the K best of these J

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Use heap for selecting top K
▪ Binary tree in which each node’s value > the values
of children
▪ Takes 2J operations to construct, then each of K
“winners” read off in 2log J steps
▪ For J=1M, K=100, this is about 10% of the cost of
sorting
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.9 .3
.3 .8 .1

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 Sec. 7.1.1

Bottlenecks
▪ Primary computational bottleneck in scoring: cosine
computation
▪ Can we avoid all this computation?
▪ Yes, but may sometimes get it wrong
▪ a doc not in the top K may creep into the list of K
output docs
▪ Is this such a bad thing?

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 Sec. 7.1.1

Cosine similarity is only a proxy

▪ User has a task and a query formulation
▪ Cosine matches docs to query
▪ Thus cosine is anyway a proxy for user happiness
▪ If we get a list of K docs “close” to the top K by cosine
measure, should be ok

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 Sec. 7.1.1

Generic approach
▪ Find a set A of contenders, with K < |A| << N
▪ A does not necessarily contain the top K, but has
many docs from among the top K
▪ Return the top K docs in A
▪ Think of A as pruning non-contenders
▪ The same approach is also used for other (non-
cosine) scoring functions
▪ Will look at several schemes following this approach

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 Sec. 7.1.2

Index Elimination
▪ Basic algorithm cosine computation algorithm only
considers docs containing at least one query term
▪ Take this further:
▪ Only consider high-idf query terms
▪ Only consider docs containing many query terms

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High-idf query terms only
▪ For a query such as “the catcher in the rye”
▪ Only accumulate scores from catcher and rye
▪ Intuition: in and the contribute little to the scores
and so don’t alter rank-ordering much
▪ Benefit:
▪ Postings of low-idf terms have many docs → these (many)
docs get eliminated from set A of contenders

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Docs containing many query terms
▪ Any doc with at least one query term is a candidate
for the top K output list
▪ For multi-term queries, only compute scores for docs
containing several of the query terms
▪ Say, at least 3 out of 4
▪ Imposes a “soft conjunction” on queries seen on web
search engines (early Google)
▪ Easy to implement in postings traversal

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 Sec. 7.1.2

3 of 4 query terms

Antony 3 4 8 16 32 64 128
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16 32

Scores only computed for docs 8, 16 and 32.

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Champion Lists
▪ Precompute for each dictionary term t, the r docs of
highest weight in t’s postings
▪ Call this the champion list for t
▪ (aka fancy list or top docs for t)
▪ Note that r has to be chosen at index build time
▪ Thus, it’s possible that r < K
▪ At query time, only compute scores for docs in the
champion list of some query term
▪ Pick the K top-scoring docs from amongst these

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 Sec. 7.1.3

Exercises
▪ How do Champion Lists relate to Index Elimination?
Can they be used together?
▪ How can Champion Lists be implemented in an
inverted index?
▪ Note that the champion list has nothing to do with small
docIDs

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 Sec. 7.1.4

Static quality scores

▪ We want top-ranking documents to be both relevant
and authoritative
▪ Relevance is being modeled by cosine scores
▪ Authority is typically a query-independent property
of a document
▪ Examples of authority signals
▪ Wikipedia mentions
▪ Articles in certain newspapers
Quantitative
▪ A paper with many citations
▪ High reddit score
▪ (Pagerank) 18
 Sec. 7.1.4

Modeling authority
▪ Assign to each document a query-independent
quality score in [0,1] to each document d
▪ Denote this by g(d)
▪ Thus, a quantity like the number of citations is scaled
into [0,1]
▪ Exercise: suggest a formula for this.

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Net score
▪ Consider a simple total score combining cosine
relevance and authority
▪ net-score(q,d) = g(d) + cosine(q,d)
▪ Can use some other linear combination
▪ Indeed, any function of the two “signals” of user happiness
– more later
▪ Now we seek the top K docs by net score

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Top K by net score – fast methods
▪ First idea: Order all postings by g(d)
▪ Key: this is a common ordering for all postings
▪ Thus, can concurrently traverse query terms’
postings for
▪ Postings intersection
▪ Cosine score computation
▪ Exercise: write pseudocode for cosine score
computation if postings are ordered by g(d)

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 Sec. 7.1.4

Why order postings by g(d)?

▪ Under g(d)-ordering, top-scoring docs likely to
appear early in postings traversal
▪ In time-bound applications (say, we have to return
whatever search results we can in 50 ms), this allows
us to stop postings traversal early
▪ Short of computing scores for all docs in postings

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 Sec. 7.1.4

Champion lists in g(d)-ordering

▪ Can combine champion lists with g(d)-ordering
▪ Maintain for each term a champion list of the r docs
with highest g(d) + tf-idftd
▪ Seek top-K results from only the docs in these
champion lists

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 Sec. 7.1.4

High and low lists

▪ For each term, we maintain two postings lists called
high and low
▪ Think of high as the champion list
▪ When traversing postings on a query, only traverse
high lists first
▪ If we get more than K docs, select the top K and stop
▪ Else proceed to get docs from the low lists
▪ Can be used even for simple cosine scores, without
global quality g(d)
▪ Segmenting index into two tiers
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 Sec. 7.1.5

Impact-ordered postings
▪ We only want to compute scores for docs for which
wft,d (weighted, non-normalized tft,d) is high enough
▪ We sort each postings list by wft,d
▪ Now: not all postings in a common order!
▪ How do we compute scores in order to pick off top K?
▪ Two ideas follow

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 Sec. 7.1.5

1. Early termination
▪ When traversing t’s postings, stop early after either
▪ a fixed number of r docs
▪ wft,d drops below some threshold
▪ Take the union of the resulting sets of docs
▪ One from the postings of each query term
▪ Compute only the scores for docs in this union

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 Sec. 7.1.5

2. idf-ordered terms
▪ When considering the postings of query terms
▪ Look at them in order of decreasing idf
▪ High idf terms likely to contribute most to score
▪ As we update score contribution from each query
term
▪ Stop if doc scores relatively unchanged
▪ Can apply to cosine or some other net scores

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Cluster pruning: preprocessing
▪ Pick N docs at random: call these leaders
▪ For every other doc, pre-compute nearest
leader
▪ Docs attached to a leader: its followers;
▪ Likely: each leader has ~ N followers

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Cluster pruning: query processing
▪ Process a query as follows:
▪ Given query Q, find its nearest leader L
▪ Seek K nearest docs from among L’s
followers

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 Sec. 7.1.6

Visualization

Query

Leader Follower 30
 Sec. 7.1.6

Why use random sampling

▪ Fast
▪ Leaders reflect data distribution

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 Sec. 7.1.6

General variants
▪ Have each follower attached to b1=3 (say) nearest
leaders
▪ From query, find b2=4 (say) nearest leaders and their
followers

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 Sec. 7.1.6

Exercises
▪ To find the nearest leader in step 1, how many cosine
computations do we do?
▪ Why did we have N in the first place?
▪ What is the effect of the constants b1, b2 on the
previous slide?
▪ Devise an example where this is likely to fail – i.e., we
miss one of the K nearest docs
▪ Likely under random sampling

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 Sec. 6.1

Parametric and zone indexes

▪ Thus far, a doc has been a sequence of terms
▪ In fact documents have multiple parts, some with
special semantics:
▪ Author
▪ Title
▪ Date of publication
▪ Language
▪ Format
▪ etc.
▪ These constitute the metadata about a document
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 Sec. 6.1

Fields
▪ We sometimes wish to search by these metadata
▪ E.g., find docs authored by William Shakespeare in the
year 1601, containing alas poor Yorick
▪ Year = 1601 is an example of a field
▪ Also, author last name = shakespeare, etc.
▪ Field or parametric index: postings for each field
value
▪ Sometimes build range trees (e.g., for dates)
▪ Field query typically treated as conjunction
▪ (doc must be authored by shakespeare)
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 Sec. 6.1

Zone
▪ A zone is a region of the doc that can contain an
arbitrary amount of text, e.g.,
▪ Title
▪ Abstract
▪ References …
▪ Build inverted indexes on zones as well to permit
querying
▪ E.g., “find docs with merchant in the title zone and
matching the query gentle rain”

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 Sec. 6.1

Example zone indexes

Encode zones in dictionary vs. postings.

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 Sec. 7.2.1

Tiered indexes
▪ Break postings up into a hierarchy of lists
▪ Most important
▪ …
▪ Least important
▪ Can be done by g(d) or another measure
▪ Inverted index thus broken up into tiers of decreasing
importance
▪ At query time use top tier unless it fails to yield K
docs
▪ If so drop to lower tiers
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Example tiered index

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Query term proximity
▪ Free text queries: just a set of terms typed into the
query box – common on the web
▪ Users prefer docs in which query terms occur within
close proximity of each other
▪ Let w be the smallest window in a doc containing all
query terms, e.g.,
▪ For the query strained mercy the smallest window in
the doc The quality of mercy is not strained is 4
(words)
▪ Would like scoring function to take this into account
– how? 40
 Sec. 7.2.3

Query parsers
▪ Free text query from user may in fact spawn one or
more queries to the indexes, e.g., query rising
interest rates
▪ Run the query as a phrase query
▪ If <K docs contain the phrase rising interest rates, run the
two phrase queries rising interest and interest rates
▪ If we still have <K docs, run the vector space query rising
interest rates
▪ Rank matching docs by vector space scoring
▪ This sequence is issued by a query parser

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 Sec. 7.2.3

Aggregate scores
▪ We’ve seen that score functions can combine cosine,
static quality, proximity, etc.
▪ How do we know the best combination?
▪ Some applications – expert-tuned
▪ Increasingly common: machine-learned

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 Sec. 7.2.4

Putting it all together

User Query
Parsing,
Linguistics
Free Text
Query Parser

Spelling Scoring &

Indexers Correction Ranking

Document Cache
Scoring
Parameters
Metadata in zone Inexact top Tiered inverted 𝑘-
and field indexes 𝐾 retrieval positional index grams ML
Indexes
Training
43 Set
 Ch. 6

Resources for today’s lecture

▪ IIR 6.1 – 6.4.3, 7

▪ http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-
tutorial/cosine-similarity-tutorial.html
▪ Term weighting and cosine similarity tutorial for SEO folk!

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