Introduction to Information

Retrieval

Introduction to

Information Retrieval
Index Construction

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Index construction
How do we construct an index?
What strategies can we use with limited main
memory?

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Hardware basics
Many design decisions in information retrieval are
based on the characteristics of hardware
We begin by reviewing hardware basics

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Hardware basics
Access to data in memory is much faster than
access to data on disk.
Disk seeks: No data is transferred from disk while
the disk head is being positioned.
Therefore: Transferring one large chunk of data
from disk to memory is faster than transferring
many small chunks.
Disk I/O is block-based: Reading and writing of
entire blocks (as opposed to smaller chunks).
Block sizes: 8KB to 256 KB.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Hardware basics
Servers used in IR systems now typically have
several GB of main memory, sometimes tens of GB.

Fault tolerance is very expensive: Its much

cheaper to use many regular machines rather than
one fault tolerant machine.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Hardware assumptions for this lecture

symbol

statistic value

s average seek time

5 ms = 5 x 103 s
b transfer time per byte 0.02 s = 2 x 108 s
processors clock rate 109 s1
p low-level operation 0.01 s = 108 s
(e.g., compare & swap a word)
size of main memory several GB
size of disk space
1 TB or more

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Reuters Corpus Volume1(RCV1):

collection
Shakespeares collected works definitely arent large
enough for demonstrating many of the points in this
course.
The collection well use isnt really large enough
either, but its publicly available and is at least a more
plausible example.
As an example for applying scalable index construction
algorithms, we will use the Reuters RCV1 collection.
This is one year of Reuters newswire (part of 1995 and
1996)

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

A Reuters RCV1 document

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Reuters RCV1 statistics

symbol statistic value

N documents
800,000
L avg. # tokens per doc 200
M terms (= word types) 400,000
avg. # bytes per token 6
(incl. spaces/punct.)

avg. # bytes per token4.5

(without spaces/punct.)

avg. # bytes per term 7.5

non-positional postings
100,000,000
4.5 bytes per word token vs. 7.5 bytes per word type: why?

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Recall: index construction

Documents are parsed to extract words
and these are saved with the Document
ID.

Doc 1
I did enact Julius
Caesar I was killed
i' the Capitol;
Brutus killed me.

Doc 2
So let it be with
Caesar. The noble
Brutus hath told you
Caesar was ambitious

Term
I
did
enact
julius
caesar
I
was
killed
i'
the
capitol
brutus
killed
me
so
let
it
be
with
caesar
the
noble
brutus
hath
told
you
caesar
was
ambitious

Doc #
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Key step
After all documents have
been parsed, the inverted
file is sorted by terms.

We focus on this sort step.

We have 100M items to sort.

Term
I
did
enact
julius
caesar
I
was
killed
i'
the
capitol
brutus
killed
me
so
let
it
be
with
caesar
the
noble
brutus
hath
told
you
caesar
was
ambitious

Doc #
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2

Term
ambitious
be
brutus
brutus
capitol
caesar
caesar
caesar
did
enact
hath
I
I
i'
it
julius
killed
killed
let
me
noble
so
the
the
told
you
was
was
with

Doc #
2
2
1
2
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
2
1
2
2
1
2
2
2
1
2
2

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Scaling index construction

In-memory index construction does not scale
Cant stuff entire collection into memory, sort,
then write back
How can we construct an index for very large
collections?
Taking into account the hardware constraints we
just learned about . . .
Memory, disk, speed, etc.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Blocked Sort-based index construction

As we build the index, we parse docs one at a time.
The final postings for any term are incomplete until
the end.
At 12 bytes per non-positional postings entry (term,
doc, freq), demands a lot of space for large
collections.
T = 100,000,000 in the case of RCV1
So we can do this in memory in 2009, but typical
collections are much larger. E.g., the New York Times
provides an index of >150 years of newswire

Thus: We need to store intermediate results on disk.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Sort using disk as memory?

Can we use the same index construction
algorithm for larger collections, but by using disk
instead of memory?
No: Sorting T = 100,000,000 records on disk is
too slow too many disk seeks.
We need an external sorting algorithm.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Bottleneck
Parse and build postings entries one doc at
a time
Now sort postings entries by term (then by
doc within each term)
Doing this with random disk seeks would
be too slow must sort T=100M records
If every comparison took 2 disk seeks, and N items could be
sorted with N log2N comparisons, how long would this take?

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

BSBI: Blocked sort-based Indexing

(Sorting with fewer disk seeks)
Segments the collection into parts of equal size.
Sorts the termIDdocID pairs of each part in
memory,
Stores intermediate sorted results on disk, and
Merges all intermediate results into the final
index.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

BSBI: Blocked sort-based Indexing

(Sorting with fewer disk seeks)
12-byte (4+4+4) records (term, doc, freq).
These are generated as we parse docs.
Must now sort 100M such 12-byte records by term.
Define a Block ~ 10M such records
Can easily fit a couple into memory.
Will have 10 such blocks to start with.
Basic idea of algorithm:
Accumulate postings for each block, sort, write
to disk.
Then merge the blocks into one long sorted
order.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Merging in blocked sort-based indexing

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

How to merge the sorted runs?

Can do binary merges, with a merge tree of
log210 = 4 layers.
During each layer, read into memory runs in
blocks of 10M, merge, write back.
1
2
1
Merged run.
2
3
4
3
Runs being
merged.

4
Disk

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

How to merge the sorted runs?

But it is more efficient to do a multi-way merge,
where you are reading from all blocks
simultaneously.
Providing you read decent-sized chunks of each
block into memory and then write out a decentsized output chunk, then youre not killed by disk
seeks

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Remaining problem with sort-based

algorithm
Our assumption was: we can keep the dictionary
in memory.
We need the dictionary (which grows dynamically)
in order to implement a term to termID mapping.
Actually, we could work with term,docID postings
instead of termID,docID postings . . .
. . . but then intermediate files become very large.
(We would end up with a scalable, but very slow
index construction method.)

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

SPIMI: Single-pass in-memory indexing

Key idea 1: Generate separate dictionaries for
each block no need to maintain term-termID
mapping across blocks.
Key idea 2: Dont sort. Accumulate postings in
postings lists as they occur.
With these two ideas we can generate a complete
inverted index for each block.
These separate indexes can then be merged into
one big index.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

SPIMI-Invert

Merging of blocks is analogous to BSBI.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

SPIMI: Compression
Compression makes SPIMI even more
efficient.
Compression of terms
Compression of postings

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Distributed indexing
For web-scale indexing:
must use a distributed computing cluster

Individual machines are fault-prone

Can unpredictably slow down or fail

How do we exploit such a pool of

machines?

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Web search engine data

centers
Web search data centers (Google, Bing,
Baidu)
mainly
contain
commodity
machines.
Data centers are distributed around the
world.
Estimate: Google ~1 million servers, 3
million processors/cores (Gartner 2007)

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Distributed indexing
Maintain a master machine directing the
indexing job considered safe.
Break up indexing into sets of (parallel)
tasks.
Master machine assigns each task to an
idle machine from a pool.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Parallel tasks
We will use two sets of parallel tasks
Parsers
Inverters

Break the input document collection into

splits
Each split is a subset of documents
(corresponding to blocks in BSBI/SPIMI)

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Parsers
Master assigns a split to an idle parser
machine
Parser reads a document at a time and
emits (term, doc) pairs
Parser writes pairs into j partitions
Each partition is for a range of terms first
letters
(e.g., a-f, g-p, q-z) here j = 3.

Now to complete the index inversion

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Inverters
An inverter collects all (term,doc) pairs (=
postings) for one term-partition.
Sorts and writes to postings lists

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Data flow
assign

splits

Master

assign

Parser

a-f g-p q-z

Parser

a-f g-p q-z

Parser

a-f g-p q-z

Map
phase

Segment files

Postings

Inverter

a-f

Inverter

g-p

Inverter

q-z

Reduce
phase

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

MapReduce
The index construction algorithm we just
described is an instance of MapReduce.
MapReduce (Dean and Ghemawat 2004) is
a robust and conceptually simple
framework for distributed computing
without having to write code for the
distribution part.
They describe the Google indexing system
(ca. 2002) as consisting of a number of
phases, each implemented in MapReduce.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

MapReduce
Index construction was just one phase.
Another phase: transforming a termpartitioned index into a documentpartitioned index.
Term-partitioned: one machine handles a
subrange of terms
Document-partitioned: one machine handles a
subrange of documents

Most search engines use a documentpartitioned index better load balancing,

etc.

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Schema for index construction in

MapReduce
Schema of map and reduce functions
map: input list(k, v)
reduce: (k,list(v)) output

Instantiation of the schema for index

construction
map: collection list(termID, docID)
reduce: (<termID1, list(docID)>, <termID2,
list(docID)>, ) (postings list1, postings list2,
)

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Example for index construction

Map:
d1 : C came, C ced.
d2 : C died. <C,d1>, <came,d1>, <C,d1>, <ced,
d1>, <C, d2>, <died,d2>

Reduce:
(<C,(d1,d2,d1)>, <died,(d2)>, <came,(d1)>, <ced,
(d1)>) (<C,(d1:2,d2:1)>, <died,(d2:1)>, <came,
(d1:1)>, <ced,(d1:1)>)

37

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Dynamic indexing
Up to now, we have assumed that
collections are static.
They rarely are:
Documents come in over time and need to be
inserted.
Documents are deleted and modified.

This means that the dictionary and

postings lists have to be modified:
Postings updates for terms already in
dictionary
New terms added to dictionary

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

39

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Simplest approach

Maintain big main index

New docs go into small auxiliary index
Search across both, merge results
Deletions
Invalidation bit-vector for deleted docs
Filter docs output on a search result by this
invalidation bit-vector

Periodically, re-index into one main index

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Issues with main and auxiliary

indexes
Problem of frequent merges you touch stuff a lot
Poor performance during merge
Actually:
Merging of the auxiliary index into the main index is
efficient if we keep a separate file for each postings list.
Merge is the same as a simple append.
But then we would need a lot of files inefficient for OS.

Assumption for the rest of the lecture: The index

is one big file.
In reality: Use a scheme somewhere in between
(e.g., split very large postings lists, collect
postings lists of length 1 in one file etc.)

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Logarithmic merge
Maintain a series of indexes, each twice as
large as the previous one
At any time, some of these powers of 2 are
instantiated

Keep smallest (Z0) in memory

Larger ones (I0, I1, ) on disk
If Z0 gets too big (> n), write to disk as I0
or merge with I0 (if I0 already exists) as Z1
Either write merge Z1 to disk as I1 (if no I1)
Or merge with I1 to form Z2

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Logarithmic merge
Auxiliary and main index: index construction time
is O(T2) as each posting is touched in each merge.
Logarithmic merge: Each posting is merged O(log
T) times, so complexity is O(T log T)
So logarithmic merge is much more efficient for
index construction
But query processing now requires the merging of
O(log T) indexes
Whereas it is O(1) if you just have a main and
auxiliary index
Where, T is total number of postings

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Dynamic indexing at search

engines
All the large search engines now do
dynamic indexing
Their indices have frequent incremental
changes
News items, blogs, new topical web pages

But (sometimes/typically) they also

periodically reconstruct the index from
scratch
Query processing is then switched to the new
index, and the old index is deleted

Introduction to Information
Retrieval

Other sorts of indexes

Positional indexes
Same sort of sorting problem just larger

Building character n-gram indexes:

Why?

As text is parsed, enumerate n-grams.

For each n-gram, need pointers to all dictionary
terms containing it the postings.
Note that the same postings entry will arise
repeatedly in parsing the docs need efficient
hashing to keep track of this.
E.g., that the trigram uou occurs in the term deciduous
will be discovered on each text occurrence of deciduous
Only need to process each term once