Boolean Retrieval

Web Search and Mining

Lecture 2: Boolean Retrieval

Boolean Retrieval IR

Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually

documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text)
that satisfies an information need from within large
collections (usually stored on computers).

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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

Unstructured (text) vs. structured

(database) data in 1996

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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

Unstructured (text) vs. structured

(database) data in 2009

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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

Unstructured data in 1680

Which plays of Shakespeare contain the words Brutus
AND Caesar but NOT Calpurnia?
One could grep all of Shakespeares 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
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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

Term-document incidence

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 Unstructured Data

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.

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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

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.

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Boolean Retrieval

Basic assumptions of Information Retrieval

Collection:
Fixed set of documents

Goal:
Retrieve documents with information that is relevant
to the users information need and helps the user
complete a task

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Boolean Retrieval

The classic search model

TASK Get rid of mice in a
politically correct way
Misconception?
Info Need Info about removing mice
without killing them
Mistranslation?
Verbal How do I trap mice alive?
form
Misformulation?

Query mouse trap

SEARCH
ENGINE

Query Results
Corpus
Refinement
Boolean Retrieval

How good are the retrieved docs?

Precision : Fraction of retrieved docs that are
relevant to users information need

Recall : Fraction of relevant docs in collection that

are retrieved

More precise definitions and measurements to

follow in later lectures

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Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

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.

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Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Cant build the matrix

500K x 1M matrix has half-a-trillion 0s and 1s.

But it has no more than one billion 1s. Why?

matrix is extremely sparse.

Whats a better representation?

We only record the 1 positions.

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Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Inverted index
For each term t, we must store a list of all documents
that contain t.
Identify each by a docID, a document serial number
Can we used fixed-size arrays for this?

Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174

Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101

What happens if the word Caesar

is added to document 14?
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Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Inverted index
We need variable-size postings lists
On disk, a continuous run of postings is normal and best
In memory, can use linked lists or variable length arrays
Some tradeoffs in size/ease of insertion Posting

Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174

Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101

Dictionary Postings
Sorted by docID (more later on why).
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Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Inverted index construction

Documents to Friends, Romans, countrymen.
be indexed.

Tokenizer
Token stream. Friends Romans Countrymen
More on Linguistic
these later. modules
Modified tokens. friend roman countryman

Indexer friend 2 4
roman 1 2
Inverted index.
countryman 13 16
Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Indexer steps: Token sequence

Sequence of (Modified token, Document ID) pairs.

Doc 1 Doc 2

I did enact Julius So let it be with

Caesar I was killed Caesar. The noble
i' the Capitol; Brutus hath told you
Brutus killed me. Caesar was ambitious
Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Indexer steps: Sort

Sort by terms
And then docID

Core indexing step

Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Indexer steps: Dictionary & Postings

Multiple term
entries in a single
document are
merged.
Split into Dictionary
and Postings
Doc. frequency
information is
added.

Why frequency?
Will discuss later.
Boolean Retrieval Inverted Index

Where do we pay in storage?

Lists of
docIDs

Terms
and
counts Later in the
course:
How do we
index
efficiently?
How much
storage do we
Pointers need?
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Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

The index we just built

How do we process a query? Todays
Later - what kinds of queries can we process? focus

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Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

Query processing: AND

Consider processing the query:
Brutus AND Caesar
Locate Brutus in the Dictionary;
Retrieve its postings.
Locate Caesar in the Dictionary;
Retrieve its postings.
Merge the two postings:

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

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Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

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

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

If the list lengths are x and y, the merge takes O(x+y)

operations.
Crucial: postings sorted by docID.
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Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

Intersecting two postings lists

(a merge algorithm)

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Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

Boolean queries: Exact match

The Boolean retrieval model is being able to ask a
query that is a Boolean expression:
Boolean Queries are queries using AND, OR and NOT to
join query terms
Views each document as a set of words
Is precise: document matches condition or not.
Perhaps the simplest model to build an IR system on
Primary commercial retrieval tool for 3 decades.
Many search systems you still use are Boolean:
Email, library catalog, Mac OS X Spotlight

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Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/

Largest commercial (paying subscribers) legal

search service (started 1975; ranking added
1992)
Tens of terabytes of data; 700,000 users
Majority of users still use boolean queries
Example query:
What is the statute of limitations in cases involving
the federal tort claims act?
LIMIT! /3 STATUTE ACTION /S FEDERAL /2 TORT
/3 CLAIM
/3 = within 3 words, /S = in same sentence 26
Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/

Another example query:

Requirements for disabled people to be able to access a
workplace
disabl! /p access! /s work-site work-place (employment /3
place
Note that SPACE is disjunction, not conjunction!
Long, precise queries; proximity operators;
incrementally developed; not like web search
Many professional searchers still like Boolean search
You know exactly what you are getting
But that doesnt mean it actually works better.
Boolean Retrieval Query Processing

Boolean queries: More general merges

Exercise: Adapt the merge for the queries:
Brutus AND NOT Caesar
Brutus OR NOT Caesar

Can we still run through the merge in time O(x+y)?

What can we achieve?

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Boolean Retrieval Query Optimization

Merging
What about an arbitrary Boolean formula?
(Brutus OR Caesar) AND NOT
(Antony OR Cleopatra)
Can we always merge in linear time?
Linear in what?
Can we do better?

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Boolean Retrieval Query Optimization

Query optimization

What is the best order for query processing?

Consider a query that is an AND of n terms.
For each of the n terms, get its postings, then
AND them together.

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

Query: Brutus AND Calpurnia AND Caesar 30

Boolean Retrieval Query Optimization

Query optimization example

Process in order of increasing freq:
start with smallest set, then keep cutting further.

This is why we kept

document freq. in dictionary

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

Execute the query as (Calpurnia AND Brutus) AND Caesar.

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Boolean Retrieval Query Optimization

More general optimization

e.g., (madding OR crowd) AND (ignoble OR strife)

Get doc. freq.s for all terms.

Estimate the size of each OR by the sum of its doc.

freq.s (conservative).

Process in increasing order of OR sizes.

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Boolean Retrieval Query Optimization

Exercise
Recommend a query
processing order for

Term Freq
(tangerine OR trees) AND eyes 213312
(marmalade OR skies) AND kaleidoscope 87009
(kaleidoscope OR eyes) marmalade 107913
skies 271658
tangerine 46653
trees 316812

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Boolean Retrieval Query Optimization

Query processing exercises

Exercise: If the query is friends AND romans AND
(NOT countrymen), how could we use the freq of
countrymen?

Exercise: Extend the merge to an arbitrary Boolean

query. Can we always guarantee execution in time
linear in the total postings size?

Hint: Begin with the case of a Boolean formula query:

in this, each query term appears only once in the
query. 34
Boolean Retrieval Beyond Term Search

Whats ahead in IR?

--- Beyond term search
What about phrases?
Stanford University

Proximity:
Find Gates NEAR Microsoft.
Need index to capture position information in docs.

Zones in documents:
Find documents with (author = Ullman) AND (text
contains automata).
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Boolean Retrieval Beyond Term Search

Evidence accumulation
1 vs. 0 occurrence of a search term
2 vs. 1 occurrence
3 vs. 2 occurrences, etc.
Usually more seems better

Need term frequency information in docs

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Boolean Retrieval Beyond Term Search

Ranking search results

Boolean queries give inclusion or exclusion of docs.

Often we want to rank/group results

Need to measure proximity from query to each doc.
Need to decide whether docs presented to user are
singletons, or a group of docs covering various aspects of
the query.

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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

IR vs. databases:
Structured vs unstructured data
Structured data tends to refer to information in
tables
Employee Manager Salary
Smith Jones 50000
Chang Smith 60000
Ivy Smith 50000

Typically allows numerical range and exact match

(for text) queries, e.g.,
Salary < 60000 AND Manager = Smith.
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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

Unstructured data
Typically refers to free text

Allows
Keyword queries including operators
More sophisticated concept queries e.g.,
find all web pages dealing with drug abuse

Classic model for searching text documents

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Boolean Retrieval Unstructured Data

Semi-structured data
In fact almost no data is unstructured

E.g., this slide has distinctly identified zones such as

the Title and Bullets

Facilitates semi-structured search such as

Title contains data AND Bullets contain search

to say nothing of linguistic structure

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Boolean Retrieval

More sophisticated semi-structured

search
Title is about Object Oriented Programming AND
Author something like stro*rup

where * is the wild-card operator

Issues:
how do you process about?
how do you rank results?

The focus of XML search (IIR chapter 10)

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Boolean Retrieval

Clustering, classification and ranking

Clustering: Given a set of docs, group them into
clusters based on their contents.

Classification: Given a set of topics, plus a new doc D,

decide which topic(s) D belongs to.

Ranking: Can we learn how to best order a set of

documents, e.g., a set of search results

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Boolean Retrieval

The web and its challenges

Unusual and diverse documents

Unusual and diverse users, queries, information

needs

Beyond terms, exploit ideas from social networks

link analysis, click streams ...

How do search engines work? And how can we

make them better? 43
Boolean Retrieval

More sophisticated information retrieval

Cross-language information retrieval

Question answering

Summarization

Text mining

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Boolean Retrieval

Question?

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