Boolean and Vector Space Retrieval Models

Many slides in this section are adapted from Prof. Joydeep Ghosh (UT ECE) who in turn adapted them from Prof. Dik Lee (Univ. of Science and Tech, Hong Kong)

Retrieval Models
A retrieval model specifies the details of:
Document representation Query representation Retrieval function

Determines a notion of relevance. Notion of relevance can be binary or continuous (i.e. ranked retrieval).
2

Classes of Retrieval Models

Boolean models (set theoretic)
Extended Boolean

Vector space models (statistical/algebraic)

Generalized VS Latent Semantic Indexing

Probabilistic models
3

Other Model Dimensions

Logical View of Documents
Index terms Full text Full text + Structure (e.g. hypertext)

User Task
Retrieval Browsing

Common Preprocessing Steps

Strip unwanted characters/markup (e.g. HTML tags, punctuation, numbers, etc.). Break into tokens (keywords) on whitespace. Stem tokens to root words
computational comput

Remove common stopwords (e.g. a, the, it, etc.). Detect common phrases (possibly using a domain specific dictionary). Build inverted index (keyword list of docs containing it).
5

Boolean Model
A document is represented as a set of keywords.
Queries are Boolean expressions of keywords, connected by AND, OR, and NOT, including the use of brackets to indicate scope.
[[Rio & Brazil] | [Hilo & Hawaii]] & hotel & !Hilton]

Output: Document is relevant or not. No partial matches or ranking.

Boolean Retrieval Model

Popular retrieval model because:
Easy to understand for simple queries. Clean formalism. Boolean models can be extended to include ranking. Reasonably efficient implementations possible for normal queries.

Boolean Models Problems

Very rigid: AND means all; OR means any. Difficult to express complex user requests. Difficult to control the number of documents retrieved.
All matched documents will be returned.

Difficult to rank output.

All matched documents logically satisfy the query.

Difficult to perform relevance feedback.

If a document is identified by the user as relevant or irrelevant, how should the query be modified?
8

Statistical Models
A document is typically represented by a bag of words (unordered words with frequencies). Bag = set that allows multiple occurrences of the same element. User specifies a set of desired terms with optional weights:
Weighted query terms: Q = < database 0.5; text 0.8; information 0.2 > Unweighted query terms: Q = < database; text; information > No Boolean conditions specified in the query.
9

Statistical Retrieval
Retrieval based on similarity between query and documents. Output documents are ranked according to similarity to query. Similarity based on occurrence frequencies of keywords in query and document. Automatic relevance feedback can be supported:
Relevant documents added to query. Irrelevant documents subtracted from query.
10

Issues for Vector Space Model

How to determine important words in a document?
Word sense? Word n-grams (and phrases, idioms,) terms

How to determine the degree of importance of a term within a document and within the entire collection? How to determine the degree of similarity between a document and the query? In the case of the web, what is a collection and what are the effects of links, formatting information, etc.?
11

The Vector-Space Model

Assume t distinct terms remain after preprocessing; call them index terms or the vocabulary. These orthogonal terms form a vector space.
Dimension = t = |vocabulary|

Each term, i, in a document or query, j, is given a real-valued weight, wij. Both documents and queries are expressed as t-dimensional vectors:
dj = (w1j, w2j, , wtj)

12

Graphic Representation
Example: D1 = 2T1 + 3T2 + 5T3 D2 = 3T1 + 7T2 + T3 Q = 0T1 + 0T2 + 2T3
D1 = 2T1+ 3T2 + 5T3 Q = 0T1 + 0T2 + 2T3
2 3

T3
5

T1
D2 = 3T1 + 7T2 + T3

T2

Is D1 or D2 more similar to Q? How to measure the degree of similarity? Distance? Angle? Projection?
13

Document Collection
A collection of n documents can be represented in the vector space model by a term-document matrix. An entry in the matrix corresponds to the weight of a term in the document; zero means the term has no significance in the document or it simply doesnt exist in the document. T1 T2 . Tt D1 w11 w21 wt1 D2 w12 w22 wt2 : : : : : : : : Dn w1n w2n wtn
14

Term Weights: Term Frequency

More frequent terms in a document are more important, i.e. more indicative of the topic. fij = frequency of term i in document j May want to normalize term frequency (tf) by dividing by the frequency of the most common term in the document: tfij = fij / maxi{fij}

15

Term Weights: Inverse Document Frequency

Terms that appear in many different documents are less indicative of overall topic. df i = document frequency of term i = number of documents containing term i idfi = inverse document frequency of term i, = log2 (N/ df i) (N: total number of documents) An indication of a terms discrimination power. Log used to dampen the effect relative to tf.
16

TF-IDF Weighting
A typical combined term importance indicator is tf-idf weighting: wij = tfij idfi = tfij log2 (N/ dfi) A term occurring frequently in the document but rarely in the rest of the collection is given high weight. Many other ways of determining term weights have been proposed. Experimentally, tf-idf has been found to work well.

17

Computing TF-IDF -- An Example

Given a document containing terms with given frequencies: A(3), B(2), C(1) Assume collection contains 10,000 documents and document frequencies of these terms are: A(50), B(1300), C(250) Then: A: tf = 3/3; idf = log2(10000/50) = 7.6; tf-idf = 7.6 B: tf = 2/3; idf = log2 (10000/1300) = 2.9; tf-idf = 2.0 C: tf = 1/3; idf = log2 (10000/250) = 5.3; tf-idf = 1.8

18

Query Vector
Query vector is typically treated as a document and also tf-idf weighted. Alternative is for the user to supply weights for the given query terms.

19

Similarity Measure
A similarity measure is a function that computes the degree of similarity between two vectors. Using a similarity measure between the query and each document:
It is possible to rank the retrieved documents in the order of presumed relevance. It is possible to enforce a certain threshold so that the size of the retrieved set can be controlled.

20

Similarity Measure - Inner Product

Similarity between vectors for the document di and query q can be computed as the vector inner product (a.k.a. dot product):

sim(dj,q) = djq =

w w
i 1 ij

iq

where wij is the weight of term i in document j and wiq is the weight of term i in the query

For binary vectors, the inner product is the number of matched query terms in the document (size of intersection). For weighted term vectors, it is the sum of the products of the weights of the matched terms.

21

Properties of Inner Product

The inner product is unbounded. Favors long documents with a large number of unique terms. Measures how many terms matched but not how many terms are not matched.

22

Inner Product -- Examples

Binary:
D = 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1,
1,

0
1

Q = 1, 0 , 1, 0, 0,

Size of vector = size of vocabulary = 7 0 means corresponding term not found in document or query

sim(D, Q) = 3

Weighted:
D1 = 2T1 + 3T2 + 5T3 Q = 0T1 + 0T2 + 2T3 D2 = 3T1 + 7T2 + 1T3

sim(D1 , Q) = 2*0 + 3*0 + 5*2 = 10 sim(D2 , Q) = 3*0 + 7*0 + 1*2 = 2

23

Cosine Similarity Measure

Cosine similarity measures the cosine of the angle between two vectors. Inner product normalized by the vector lengths. dj q ( wij wiq) CosSim(dj, q) = dj q wij wiq
t i 1 t 2 t i 1 i 1

t3

D1
2

Q
t1

t2

D2

D1 = 2T1 + 3T2 + 5T3 CosSim(D1 , Q) = 10 / (4+9+25)(0+0+4) = 0.81 D2 = 3T1 + 7T2 + 1T3 CosSim(D2 , Q) = 2 / (9+49+1)(0+0+4) = 0.13 Q = 0T1 + 0T2 + 2T3 D1 is 6 times better than D2 using cosine similarity but only 5 times better using
inner product.
24

Nave Implementation
Convert all documents in collection D to tf-idf weighted vectors, dj, for keyword vocabulary V. Convert query to a tf-idf-weighted vector q. For each dj in D do Compute score sj = cosSim(dj, q) Sort documents by decreasing score. Present top ranked documents to the user.

Time complexity: O(|V||D|) Bad for large V & D ! |V| = 10,000; |D| = 100,000; |V||D| = 1,000,000,000
25

Comments on Vector Space Models

Simple, mathematically based approach. Considers both local (tf) and global (idf) word occurrence frequencies. Provides partial matching and ranked results. Tends to work quite well in practice despite obvious weaknesses. Allows efficient implementation for large document collections.

26

Problems with Vector Space Model

Missing semantic information (e.g. word sense). Missing syntactic information (e.g. phrase structure, word order, proximity information). Assumption of term independence (e.g. ignores synonomy). Lacks the control of a Boolean model (e.g., requiring a term to appear in a document).
Given a two-term query A B, may prefer a document containing A frequently but not B, over a document that contains both A and B, but both less frequently.
27