Chapter Four

IR models

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 What do we mean by model?

• Assumptions
• You will say
– It is smaller than the real thing
– It looks like the same to the real thing
– It looks different, made of different stuff
– A representation
– It doers some of the same things
– It is for understanding something
• Each answer is correct

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• Model is an idealization or abstraction of the actual
process (here, retrieval)
• It represents something that exists or is planned in
the real world and that in someway is too complex or
large for us to understand it as it stands
• A model is, in someway, simplified, or reduced in size,
scope or scale.
• Helps to understand the system better
• The best way, scientific way to study reality
• Thus, a model is a simplified representation of a
complex reality, usually for the purpose of
understanding that reality, and having all the features
of that reality necessary for the current task or
problem

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 What is a retrieval model?
• Are models that describe the computational process
– e.g. how documents are ranked( i. e how documents or
indexes are stored is implemented)
• Are models that attempt to describe the human
process
– e.g. the information need, interaction
– Few do so meaningfully
• Retrieval variables: queries, documents, terms,
relevance judgments, users, information needs, …
• Retrieval models have an explicit or implicit
definition of relevance

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 What an IR model includes?
• The retrieval mechanism
– used to match query with a set of documents
• The ways in which the user’s information need can
be formulated as a query
– that can be searched by that mechanism
• The human computer interaction
– that needs to take place to ensure the most appropriate
processing of the query
• The social and cognitive environments
– in which that interaction takes place
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 IR Models

• A number of IR models are proposed over the

years
• Among them are 15 important IR models
• These are grouped into 3 major categories
– Classic model
– Structured model
– Browsing

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 IR Models

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 IR Models - Basic Concepts
• Word evidence:
 IR systems usually adopt index terms to index and retrieve
documents
 Each document is represented by a set of representative
keywords or index terms (called Bag of Words)
• An index term is a word useful for remembering the
document main themes
• Not all terms are equally useful for representing the
document contents:
 less frequent terms allow identifying a narrower set of
documents
• But no ordering information is attached to the Bag of
Words identified from the document collection.
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 IR Models - Basic Concepts
• One central problem regarding IR systems is the
issue of predicting the degree of relevance of
documents for a given query
 Such a decision is usually dependent on a ranking
algorithm which attempts to establish a simple
ordering of the documents retrieved
 Documents appearning at the top of this ordering
are considered to be more likely to be relevant
• Thus ranking algorithms are at the core of IR systems
 The IR models determine the predictions of what
is relevant and what is not, based on the notion of
relevance implemented by the system
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 General Procedures Followed
To find relevant documens for a given query,
• First, map documents and queries into term-document
vector space.
 Note that queries are considered as short document
• Second, queries and documents are represented as
weighted vectors, wij
 There are binary weights & non-binary weighting
technique
• Third, rank documents by the closeness of their vectors to
the query.
 Documents are ranked by closeness to the query.
Closeness is determined by a similarity score calculation
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 Mapping Documents & Queries
• Represent both documents and queries as N-dimensional
vectors in a term-document matrix, which shows
occurrence of terms in the document collection or query

d j  (t1, j , t 2, j ,..., t N , j ); qk  (t1,k , t 2,k ,..., t N ,k )
• An entry in the matrix corresponds to the “weight” of a
term in the document; zero means the term doesn’t exist in
the document.
T1 T2 …. TN – Document collection is mapped to
D1 w11 w21 … w1N term-by-document matrix
D2 w21 w22 … w2N – View as vector in multidimensional
: : : : space
: : : : • Nearby vectors are related
DM wM1 wM2 … wMN – Normalize for vector length to avoid
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the effect of document length 11
 The Boolean Model
• Boolean model is a simple model based on set theory
 The Boolean model imposes a binary criterion
for deciding relevance
• Terms are either present or absent. Thus,
wij  {0,1}
• sim(q,dj) = 1, if document satisfies the boolean query
0 otherwise T1 T2 …. TN
D1 w11 w12 … w1N
- Note that, no weights D2 w21 w22 … w2N
assigned in-between 0 and 1, : : : :
just only values 0 or 1
: : : :
DM wM1 wM2 … wMN
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 The Boolean Model: Example
Given the following three documents, Construct Term – document
matrix and find the relevant documents retrieved by the
Boolean model for the query “gold silver truck”
• D1: “Shipment of gold damaged in a fire”
• D2: “Delivery of silver arrived in a silver truck”
• D3: “Shipment of gold arrived in a truck”
Table below shows document –term (ti) matrix
Arrive damage deliver fire gold silver ship truck
D1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0
D2 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1
D3 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1
query 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1

Also find the documents relevant for the queries:

(a)gold delivery; (b) ship gold; (c) silver truck
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The Boolean Model: Further Example
• Given the following determine documents retrieved by the
Boolean model based IR system
• Index Terms: K1, …,K8.
• Documents:

1. D1 = {K1, K2, K3, K4, K5}

2. D2 = {K1, K2, K3, K4}
3. D3 = {K2, K4, K6, K8}
4. D4 = {K1, K3, K5, K7}
5. D5 = {K4, K5, K6, K7, K8}
6. D6 = {K1, K2, K3, K4}
• Query: K1 (K2  K3)
• Answer: {D1, D2, D4, D6} ({D1, D2, D3, D6} {D3, D5})
= {D1, D2, D6}
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 Exercise
Given the following four documents with the following
contents:
– D1 = “computer information retrieval”
– D2 = “computer retrieval”
– D3 = “information”
– D4 = “computer information”

• What are the relevant documents retrieved for the

queries:
– Q1 = “information  retrieval”
– Q2 = “information  ¬computer”
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Drawbacks of the Boolean Model
• Retrieval based on binary decision criteria with no
notion of partial matching
• No ranking of the documents is provided (absence of
a grading scale)
• Information need has to be translated into a Boolean
expression which most users find awkward
• The Boolean queries formulated by the users are
most often too simplistic
 As a consequence, the Boolean model frequently
returns either too few or too many documents in
response to a user query

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 Vector-Space Model
• This is the most commonly used strategy for measuring
relevance of documents for a given query. This is
because,
 Use of binary weights is too limiting
 Non-binary weights provide consideration for partial
matches
• These term weights are used to compute a degree of
similarity between a query and each document
 Ranked set of documents provides for better
matching
• The idea behind VSM is that
 the meaning of a document is conveyed by the words
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 Vector-Space Model
To find relevant documens for a given query,
• First, map documents and queries into term-document vector
space.
Note that queries are considered as short document
• Second, in the vector space, queries and documents are
represented as weighted vectors, wij
There are different weighting technique; the most widely used one
is computing TF*IDF weight for each term

• Third, similarity measurement is used to rank documents by

the closeness of their vectors to the query.
To measure closeness of documents to the query cosine similarity
score is used by most search engines
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 Term-document matrix.
• A collection of n documents and query 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 doesn’t exist in the document. Otherwise, wij > 0
whenever ki  dj
T1 T2 …. TN
• How to compute weights
D1 w11 w21 … w1N for term i in document j and
D2 w21 w22 … w2N in query q; wij and wiq ?
: : : :
: : : :
DM wM1 wM2 … wMN
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 Example: Computing weights
• A collection includes 10,000 documents
 The term A appears 20 times in a particular document j
 The maximum appearance of any term in document j is
50
 The term A appears in 2,000 of the collection
documents.

• Compute TF,IDF weight of term A?

 tf(A,j) = freq(A,j) / max(freq(k,j)) = 20/50 = 0.4
 idf(A) = log(N/DFA) = log2 (10,000/2,000) = 2.32
 wAj = tf(A,j) * log2(N/DFA) = 0.4 * 2.32 = 0.928
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 Similarity Measure
• A similarity measure is a function that computes the
degree of similarity between document j and users
query.  

n
d j q wi , j wi ,q
sim(d j , q )     i 1

i 1 w i 1 i,q
n n
dj q 2
i, j w 2

• Using a similarity score 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 beginning so that we
can control the size of the retrieved set of documents.
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 Vector Space with Term Weights and
Cosine Matching
Di=(d1i,w1di;d2i, w2di;…;dti, wtdi)
Term B
Q =(q1i,w1qi;q2i, w2qi;…;qti, wtqi)
1.0 Q = (0.4,0.8)

t
D2 Q D1=(0.8,0.3)
j 1
w jq w jdi
0.8 D2=(0.2,0.7) sim(Q, Di ) 
 j 1 (w jq )  j 1 jdi
t 2 t 2
( w )
0.6
2 (0.4  0.2)  (0.8  0.7)
sim (Q, D 2) 
0.4
[(0.4) 2  (0.8) 2 ]  [(0.2) 2  (0.7) 2 ]
D1
0.2 1 0.64
  0.98
0.42
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
.56
Term A sim(Q, D1 )   0.74
0.58
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 Vector-Space Model: Example
• Suppose user query for: Q = “gold silver truck”. The
database collection consists of three documents with the
following content.
D1: “Shipment of gold damaged in a fire”
D2: “Delivery of silver arrived in a silver truck”
D3: “Shipment of gold arrived in a truck”
• Show retrieval results in ranked order?
1.Assume that full text terms are used during indexing,
without removing common terms, stop words, & also no
terms are stemmed.
2.Assume that content-bearing terms are selected during
indexing
3.Also compare your result with or without normalizing
term frequency
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 Vector-Space Model: Example
Counts TF Wi = TF*IDF
Terms Q D1 D2 D3 DF IDF Q D1 D2 D3

a 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 0 0
arrived 0 0 1 1 2 0.176 0 0 0.176 0.176
damaged 0 1 0 0 1 0.477 0 0.477 0 0
delivery 0 0 1 0 1 0.477 0 0 0.477 0
fire 0 1 0 0 1 0.477 0 0.477 0 0
gold 1 1 0 1 2 0.176 0.176 0.176 0 0.176
in 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 0 0
of 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 0 0
silver 1 0 2 0 1 0.477 0.477 0 0.954 0
shipment
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25
 Vector-Space Model
Terms Q D1 D2 D3
a 0 0 0 0
arrived 0 0 0.176 0.176
damaged 0 0.477 0 0
delivery 0 0 0.477 0
fire 0 0.477 0 0
gold 0.176 0.176 0 0.176
in 0 0 0 0
of 0 0 0 0
silver 0.477 0 0.954 0
shipment 0 0.176 0 0.176
truck 0.176 0 0.176 0.176
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 Vector-Space Model: Example
• Compute similarity using cosine Sim(q,d1)
• First, for each document and query, compute all vector
lengths (zero terms ignored)
|d1|= 0.477 2  0.477 2  0.1762  0.=
1762 0=.517
0.719
|d2|= 0.1762  0.477 2  0.9542  0.=1762 1.=1996
1.095
|d3|= 0.176 2  0.176 2  0.176 2  0.=
1762 0=.124
0.352

|q|= 0.1762  0.4712  0.176=2 = 0.538

0.2896
• Next, compute dot products (zero products ignored)
Q*d1= 0.176*0.167 = 0.0310
Q*d2 = 0.954*0.477 + 0.176 *0.176 = 0.4862
Q*d3
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= 0.176*0.167 + 0.176*0.167 = 0.0620 27
 Vector-Space Model: Example
Now, compute similarity score
Sim(q,d1) = (0.0310) / (0.538*0.719) = 0.0801
Sim(q,d1) = (0.4862 ) / (0.538*1.095)= 0.8246
Sim(q,d1) = (0.0620) / (0.538*0.352)= 0.3271
Finally, we sort and rank documents in descending
order according to the similarity scores
Rank 1: Doc 2 = 0.8246
Rank 2: Doc 3 = 0.3271
Rank 3: Doc 1 = 0.0801

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 Vector-Space Model
• Advantages:
• Term-weighting improves quality of the answer set
since it helps to display relevant documents in ranked
order
• Partial matching allows retrieval of documents that
approximate the query conditions
• Cosine ranking formula sorts documents according to
degree of similarity to the query
• Disadvantages:
• Assumes independence of index terms. It doesn’t
relate one term with another term
• Computationally expensive since it measures the
similarity between each document and the query
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 Probabilistic Model
• IR is an uncertain process
–Mapping Information need to Query is not perfect
–Mapping Documents to index terms is a logical representation
–Query terms and index terms mostly mismatch
• This situation leads to several statistical approaches:
probability theory, fuzzy logic, theory of evidence,
language modeling, etc.
• Probabilistic retrieval model is hard formal model that
attempts to predict the probability that a given document
will be relevant to a given query; i.e. Prob(R|(q,di))
–Use probability to estimate the “odds” of relevance of a query to
a document.
–It relies on accurate estimates of probabilities

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 Terms Existence in Relevant Document
N=the total number of documents in the collection
n= the total number of documents that contain term ti
R=the total number of relevant documents retrieved
r=the total number of relevant documents retrieved that contain term t i

(r  0.5)( N  n  R  r  0.5)
wi  log
(n  r  0.5)( R  r  0.5)

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 Probabilistic model
• Probabilistic model uses probability theory to model the
uncertainty in the retrieval process
– Relevance feedback can improve the ranking by giving better
term probability estimates
• Advantages of probabilistic model over vector‐space
– Strong theoretical basis
– Since the base is probability theory, it is very well understood
– Easy to extend
• Disadvantages
– Models are often complicated
– No term frequency weighting

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 ?

. Thank you!

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