Information Retrieval and

Web Search
Introduction
 Text mining refers to data mining using text
documents as data.
 Most text mining tasks use Information
Retrieval (IR) methods to pre-process text
documents.
 These methods are quite different from
traditional data pre-processing methods
used for relational tables.
 Web search also has its root in IR.

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Information Retrieval (IR)
 Conceptually, IR is the study of finding needed
information. I.e., IR helps users find information
that matches their information needs.
 Expressed as queries
 Historically, IR is about document retrieval,
emphasizing document as the basic unit.
 Finding documents relevant to user queries
 Technically, IR studies the acquisition,
organization, storage, retrieval, and distribution of
information.

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IR architecture

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IR queries

 Keyword queries- gives at at-least one term

 Boolean queries (using AND, OR, NOT)
 Phrase queries: sequence of words “ “
 Proximity queries: combination of term &
phrase
 Full document queries: URL base queries
 Natural language questions: “defined as”

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Information retrieval models
 An IR model governs how a document and a
query are represented and how the relevance
of a document to a user query is defined.
 Main models:
 Boolean model
 Vector space model
 Statistical language model
 etc

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Boolean model
 Each document or query is treated as a “bag”
of words or terms. Word sequence is not
considered.
 Given a collection of documents D, let V = {t1,
t2, ..., t|V|} be the set of distinctive words/terms
in the collection. V is called the vocabulary.
 A weight wij > 0 is associated with each term ti
of a document dj ∈ D. For a term that does not
appear in document dj, wij = 0.
dj = (w1j, w2j, ..., w|V|j),
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Boolean model (contd)
 Query terms are combined logically using the
Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.
 E.g., ((data AND mining) AND (NOT text))
 Retrieval
 Given a Boolean query, the system retrieves every
document that makes the query logically true.
 Called exact match.
 The retrieval results are usually quite poor
because term frequency is not considered.

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Vector space model
 Documents are also treated as a “bag” of words or
terms.
 Each document is represented as a vector.
 However, the term weights are no longer 0 or 1. Each
term weight is computed based on some variations of
TF or TF-IDF scheme.

 Term Frequency (TF) Scheme: The weight of a term ti

in document dj is the number of times that ti appears in
dj, denoted by fij. Normalization may also be applied.

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TF-IDF term weighting scheme
 The most well known
weighting scheme
 TF: still term frequency
 IDF: inverse document

frequency.
N: total number of docs
dfi: the number of docs that ti
appears.
 The final TF-IDF term
weight is:

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Retrieval in vector space model
 Query q is represented in the same way or slightly
differently.
 Relevance of di to q: Compare the similarity of
query q and document di.
 Cosine similarity (the cosine of the angle between
the two vectors)

 Cosine is also commonly used in text clustering

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An Example
 A document space is defined by three terms:
 hardware, software, users
 the vocabulary
 A set of documents are defined as:
 A1=(1, 0, 0), A2=(0, 1, 0), A3=(0, 0, 1)
 A4=(1, 1, 0), A5=(1, 0, 1), A6=(0, 1, 1)
 A7=(1, 1, 1) A8=(1, 0, 1). A9=(0, 1, 1)
 If the Query is “hardware and software”
 what documents should be retrieved?

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An Example (cont.)
 In Boolean query matching:
 document A4, A7 will be retrieved (“AND”)
 retrieved: A1, A2, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9 (“OR”)
 In similarity matching (cosine):
 q=(1, 1, 0)
 S(q, A1)=0.71, S(q, A2)=0.71, S(q, A3)=0
 S(q, A4)=1, S(q, A5)=0.5, S(q, A6)=0.5
 S(q, A7)=0.82, S(q, A8)=0.5, S(q, A9)=0.5
 Document retrieved set (with ranking)=
 {A4, A7, A1, A2, A5, A6, A8, A9}

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Okapi relevance method
 Another way to assess the degree of relevance is to
directly compute a relevance score for each
document to the query.
 The Okapi method and its variations are popular
techniques in this setting.

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Relevance feedback
 Relevance feedback is one of the techniques for
improving retrieval effectiveness. The steps:
 the user first identifies some relevant (Dr) and irrelevant
documents (Dir) in the initial list of retrieved documents
 the system expands the query q by extracting some
additional terms from the sample relevant and irrelevant
documents to produce qe
 Perform a second round of retrieval.
 Rocchio method (α, β and γ are parameters)

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 Rocchio text classifier
 In fact, a variation of the Rocchio method above,
called the Rocchio classification method, can be
used to improve retrieval effectiveness too
 so are other machine learning methods. Why?
 Rocchio classifier is constructed by producing a
prototype vector ci for each class i (relevant or
irrelevant in this case):

 In classification, cosine is used.

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 The user issues a (short, simple) query.
 The system returns an initial set of retrieval results.
 The user marks some returned documents as relevant or
nonrelevant.
 The system computes a better representation of the information
need based on the user feedback.
 The system displays a revised set of retrieval results.

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Text pre-processing
 Word (term) extraction: easy
 Stopwords removal
 Stemming
 Frequency counts and computing TF-IDF
term weights.

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Stopwords removal
 Many of the most frequently used words in English are useless
in IR and text mining – these words are called stop words.
 the, of, and, to, ….

 Typically about 400 to 500 such words

 For an application, an additional domain specific stopwords list

may be constructed
 Why do we need to remove stopwords?
 Reduce indexing (or data) file size
 stopwords accounts 20-30% of total word counts.

 Improve efficiency and effectiveness

 stopwords are not useful for searching or text mining

 they may also confuse the retrieval system.

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 Stemming
 Techniques used to find out the root/stem of a
word. E.g.,
 user engineering
 users engineered
 used engineer
 using
 stem: use engineer
Usefulness:
 improving effectiveness of IR and text mining
 matching similar words
 Mainly improve recall
 reducing indexing size
 combing words with same roots may reduce indexing
size as much as 40-50%.

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Basic stemming methods
Using a set of rules. E.g.,
 remove ending
 if a word ends with a consonant other than s,
followed by an s, then delete s.
 if a word ends in es, drop the s.
 if a word ends in ing, delete the ing unless the remaining word
consists only of one letter or of th.
 If a word ends with ed, preceded by a consonant, delete the ed
unless this leaves only a single letter.
 …...
 transform words
 if a word ends with “ies” but not “eies” or “aies” then “ies --> y.”

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Frequency counts + TF-IDF
 Counts the number of times a word occurred
in a document.
 Using occurrence frequencies to indicate relative
importance of a word in a document.
 if a word appears often in a document, the document
likely “deals with” subjects related to the word.
 Counts the number of documents in the
collection that contains each word
 TF-IDF can be computed.

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Evaluation: Precision and Recall
 Given a query:
 Are all retrieved documents relevant?
 Have all the relevant documents been retrieved?
 Measures for system performance:
 The first question is about the precision of the
search
 The second is about the completeness (recall) of
the search.

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Precision-recall curve

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Compare different retrieval
algorithms

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Compare with multiple queries
 Compute the average precision at each recall
level.

 Draw precision recall curves

 Do not forget the F-score evaluation measure.

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Rank precision

 Compute the precision values at some

selected rank positions.
 Mainly used in Web search evaluation.
 For a Web search engine, we can compute
precisions for the top 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30
returned pages
 as the user seldom looks at more than 30 pages.
 Recall is not very meaningful in Web search.
 Why?
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Web Search as a huge IR system
 A Web crawler (robot) crawls the Web to
collect all the pages.
 Servers establish a huge inverted indexing
database and other indexing databases
 At query (search) time, search engines
conduct different types of vector query
matching.

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Inverted index
 The inverted index of a document collection
is basically a data structure that
 attaches each distinctive term with a list of all
documents that contains the term.
 Thus, in retrieval, it takes constant time to
 find the documents that contains a query term.
 multiple query terms are also easy handle as we
will see soon.

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An example

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Index construction
 Easy! See the example,

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Search using inverted index
Given a query q, search has the following steps:
 Step 1 (vocabulary search): find each
term/word in q in the inverted index.
 Step 2 (results merging): Merge results to
find documents that contain all or some of the
words/terms in q.
 Step 3 (Rank score computation): To rank
the resulting documents/pages, using,
 content-based ranking
 link-based ranking

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Different search engines
 The real differences among different search
engines are
 their index weighting schemes
 Including location of terms, e.g., title, body,
emphasized words, etc.
 their query processing methods (e.g., query
classification, expansion, etc)
 their ranking algorithms
 Few of these are published by any of the search
engine companies. They aretightly guarded
secrets.

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