Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch.

Ranked retrieval
 Thus far, our queries have all been Boolean.
 Documents either match or don’t.
 Good for expert users with precise understanding of
their needs and the collection.
 Also good for applications: Applications can easily
consume 1000s of results.
 Not good for the majority of users.
 Most users incapable of writing Boolean queries (or they
are, but they think it’s too much work).
 Most users don’t want to wade through 1000s of results.
 This is particularly true of web search.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Problem with Boolean search:

feast or famine
 Boolean queries often result in either too few (=0) or
too many (1000s) results.
 Query 1: “standard user dlink 650” → 200,000 hits
 Query 2: “standard user dlink 650 no card found”: 0
hits
 It takes a lot of skill to come up with a query that
produces a manageable number of hits.
 AND gives too few; OR gives too many
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Ranked retrieval models

 Rather than a set of documents satisfying a query
expression, in ranked retrieval, the system returns an
ordering over the (top) documents in the collection
for a query
 Free text queries: Rather than a query language of
operators and expressions, the user’s query is just
one or more words in a human language
 In principle, there are two separate choices here, but
in practice, ranked retrieval has normally been
associated with free text queries and vice versa
3
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Feast or famine: not a problem in

ranked retrieval
 When a system produces a ranked result set, large
result sets are not an issue
 Indeed, the size of the result set is not an issue
 We just show the top k ( ≈ 10) results
 We don’t overwhelm the user

 Premise: the ranking algorithm works

Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Scoring as the basis of ranked retrieval

 We wish to return in order the documents most likely
to be useful to the searcher
 How can we rank-order the documents in the
collection with respect to a query?
 Assign a score – say in [0, 1] – to each document
 This score measures how well document and query
“match”.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Take 1: Jaccard coefficient

 A common measure of overlap of two sets A and B
 jaccard(A,B) = |A ∩ B| / |A ∪ B|
 jaccard(A,A) = 1
 jaccard(A,B) = 0 if A ∩ B = 0
 A and B don’t have to be the same size.
 Always assigns a number between 0 and 1.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Jaccard coefficient: Scoring example

 What is the query-document match score that the
Jaccard coefficient computes for each of the two
documents below?
 Query: ides of march
 Document 1: caesar died in march
 Document 2: the long march
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Issues with Jaccard for scoring

 It doesn’t consider term frequency (how many times
a term occurs in a document)
 Rare terms in a collection are more informative than
frequent terms. Jaccard doesn’t consider this
information
 We need a more sophisticated way of normalizing for
length
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 6

Query-document matching scores

 We need a way of assigning a score to a
query/document pair
 Let’s start with a one-term query
 If the query term does not occur in the document:
score should be 0
 The more frequent the query term in the document,
the higher the score (should be)
 We will look at a number of alternatives for this.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2

Recall (Lecture 2): Binary term-

document incidence matrix
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

Each document is represented by a binary vector ∈ {0,1}|V|

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2

Term-document count matrices

 Consider the number of occurrences of a term in a
document:
 Each document is a count vector in ℕv: a column below

Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth

Antony 157 73 0 0 0 0
Brutus 4 157 0 1 0 0
Caesar 232 227 0 2 1 1
Calpurnia 0 10 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 57 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 2 0 3 5 5 1
worser 2 0 1 1 1 0
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Bag of words model

 Vector representation doesn’t consider the ordering
of words in a document
 John is quicker than Mary and Mary is quicker than
John have the same vectors
 This is called the bag of words model.
 In a sense, this is a step back: The positional index
was able to distinguish these two documents.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Term frequency tf
 The term frequency tft,d of term t in document d is
defined as the number of times that t occurs in d.
 Note: Frequency means count in IR
 We want to use tf when computing query-document
match scores. But how?
 Raw term frequency is not what we want:
 A document with 10 occurrences of the term is more
relevant than a document with 1 occurrence of the term.
 But not 10 times more relevant.
 Relevance does not increase proportionally with
term frequency.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2

Log-frequency weighting
 The log frequency weight of term t in d is
1  log10 tf t,d , if tf t,d  0
wt,d 
 0, otherwise

 0 → 0, 1 → 1, 2 → 1.3, 10 → 2, 1000 → 4, etc.

 Score for a document-query pair: sum over terms t in
both q and d:

 score  tqd (1  log tf t ,d )

 The score is 0 if none of the query terms is present in

the document.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2.1

Rare terms are more informative

 Rare terms are more informative than frequent terms
 Recall stop words
 Consider a term in the query that is rare in the
collection (e.g., arachnocentric)
 A document containing this term is very likely to be
relevant to the query arachnocentric
 → We want a high weight for rare terms like
arachnocentric.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2.1

Collection vs. Document frequency

 Collection frequency of t is the number of
occurrences of t in the collection
 Document frequency of t is the number of documents
in which t occurs
 Example: Word Collection Document
frequency frequency

insurance 10440 3997

try 10422 8760

 Which word is for better search (gets higher weight)

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2.1

idf weight
 dft is the document frequency of t: the number of
documents that contain t
 dft is an inverse measure of the informativeness of t
 dft  N
 We define the idf (inverse document frequency) of t
by idf  log ( N/df )t 10 t

 We use log (N/dft) instead of N/dft to “dampen” the effect

of idf.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2.1

idf example, suppose N = 1 million

term dft idft
calpurnia 1 6
animal 100 4
sunday 1,000 3
fly 10,000 2
under 100,000 1
the 1,000,000 0

idf t  log10 ( N/df t )

There is one idf value for each term t in a collection.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Effect of idf on ranking

 Does idf have an effect on ranking for one-term
queries, like
 iPhone
 idf has no effect on ranking one term queries
 idf affects the ranking of documents for queries with at
least two terms
 For the query capricious person, idf weighting makes
occurrences of capricious count for much more in the
final document ranking than occurrences of person.

19
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2.2

tf-idf weighting
 The tf-idf weight of a term is the product of its tf
weight and its idf weight.
w t ,d  log(1  tf t ,d )  log10 ( N / df t )

 Best known weighting scheme in information retrieval

 Note: the “-” in tf-idf is a hyphen, not a minus sign!
 Alternative names: tf.idf, tf x idf
 Increases with the number of occurrences within a
document
 Increases with the rarity of the term in the collection
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.2.2

Score for a document given a query

Score(q,d)   tf.idft,d
t qd

 There are many variants

 How “tf” is computed (with/without logs)
 Whether the terms in the query are also weighted
…

21
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Binary → count → weight matrix

Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth

Antony 5.25 3.18 0 0 0 0.35

Brutus 1.21 6.1 0 1 0 0
Caesar 8.59 2.54 0 1.51 0.25 0
Calpurnia 0 1.54 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 2.85 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 1.51 0 1.9 0.12 5.25 0.88
worser 1.37 0 0.11 4.15 0.25 1.95

Each document is now represented by a real-valued vector of

tf-idf weights ∈ R|V|
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Documents as vectors
 So we have a |V|-dimensional vector space
 Terms are axes of the space
 Documents are points or vectors in this space
 Very high-dimensional: tens of millions of dimensions
when you apply this to a web search engine
 These are very sparse vectors - most entries are zero.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Queries as vectors
 Key idea 1: Do the same for queries: represent them
as vectors in the space
 Key idea 2: Rank documents according to their
proximity to the query in this space
 proximity = similarity of vectors
 proximity ≈ inverse of distance
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Formalizing vector space proximity

 First cut: distance between two points
 ( = distance between the end points of the two vectors)
 Euclidean distance?
 Euclidean distance is a bad idea . . .
 . . . because Euclidean distance is large for vectors of
different lengths.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Why distance is a bad idea

The Euclidean
distance between q
and d2 is large even
though the
distribution of terms
in the query q and the
distribution of
terms in the
document d2 are
very similar.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Use angle instead of distance

 Thought experiment: take a document d and append
it to itself. Call this document d′.
 “Semantically” d and d′ have the same content
 The Euclidean distance between the two documents
can be quite large
 The angle between the two documents is 0,
corresponding to maximal similarity.

 Key idea: Rank documents according to angle with

query.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

From angles to cosines

 The following two notions are equivalent.
 Rank documents in decreasing order of the angle between
query and document
 Rank documents in increasing order of
cosine(query,document)
 Cosine is a monotonically decreasing function for the
interval [0o, 180o]
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

From angles to cosines

 But how should we be computing cosines?

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Length normalization
 A vector can be (length-) normalized by dividing each
of its components by its length – for this we use the
L2 norm: 
x 2  i xi2

 Dividing a vector by its L2 norm makes it a unit

(length) vector (on surface of unit hypersphere)
 Effect on the two documents d and d′ (d appended to
itself) from earlier slide: they have identical vectors
after length-normalization.
 Long and short documents now have comparable weights
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

cosine(query,document)
Dot product Unit vectors
   

V
  qd q d q di
i 1 i
cos(q , d )      
q
qd d
 i1 i
V 2 V
2
q
i 1 i
d

qi is the weight of term i in the query

di is the weight of term i in the document

cos(q,d) is the cosine similarity of q and d … or,

equivalently, the cosine of the angle between q and d.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Cosine for length-normalized vectors

 For length-normalized vectors, cosine similarity is
simply the dot product (or scalar product):

  
cos(q, d )  q  d   qi di
V

 i1

for q, d length-normalized.

32
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Cosine similarity illustrated

33
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Cosine similarity amongst 3 documents

How similar are
the novels term SaS PaP WH

SaS: Sense and affection 115 58 20

Sensibility jealous 10 7 11

gossip 2 0 6
PaP: Pride and
wuthering 0 0 38
Prejudice, and
WH: Wuthering Term frequencies (counts)
Heights?

Note: To simplify this example, we don’t do idf weighting.

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

3 documents example contd.

Log frequency weighting After length normalization

term SaS PaP WH term SaS PaP WH

affection 3.06 2.76 2.30 affection 0.789 0.832 0.524
jealous 2.00 1.85 2.04 jealous 0.515 0.555 0.465
gossip 1.30 0 1.78 gossip 0.335 0 0.405
wuthering 0 0 2.58 wuthering 0 0 0.588

dot(SaS,PaP) ≈ 12.1 cos(SaS,PaP) ≈ 0.94

dot(SaS,WH) ≈ 13.4 cos(SaS,WH) ≈ 0.79
dot(PaP,WH) ≈ 10.1 cos(PaP,WH) ≈ 0.69
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.3

Computing cosine scores

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.4

Computing cosine scores

 Previous algorithm scores term-at-a-time (TAAT)
 Algorithm can be adapted to scoring document-at-a-
time (DAAT)
 Storing wt,d in each posting could be expensive
 …because we’d have to store a floating point number
 For tf-idf scoring, it suffices to store tft,d in the posting and
idft in the head of the postings list
 Extracting the top K items can be done with a priority
queue (e.g., a heap)
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.4

tf-idf weighting has many variants

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.4

Weighting may differ in queries vs

documents
 Many search engines allow for different weightings
for queries vs. documents
 SMART Notation: denotes the combination in use in
an engine, with the notation ddd.qqq, using the
acronyms from the previous table
 A very standard weighting scheme is: lnc.ltc
 Document: logarithmic tf (l as first character), no idf
and cosine normalization
 Query: logarithmic tf (l in leftmost column), idf (t in
second column), cosine normalization …
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 6.4

tf-idf example: lnc.ltc

Document: car insurance auto insurance
Query: best car insurance
Term Query Document Prod

tf- tf-wt df idf wt n’lize tf-raw tf-wt wt n’lize

raw
auto 0 0 5000 2.3 0 0 1 1 1 0.52 0
best 1 1 50000 1.3 1.3 0.34 0 0 0 0 0
car 1 1 10000 2.0 2.0 0.52 1 1 1 0.52 0.27
insurance 1 1 1000 3.0 3.0 0.78 2 1.3 1.3 0.68 0.53

Doc length = 12  0 2  12  1.32  1.92

Score = 0+0+0.27+0.53 = 0.8