0% found this document useful (0 votes)
16 views30 pages

Web Search

The document discusses the challenges and methodologies of web search and information retrieval, highlighting issues such as the quality of web content, the volume of documents, and the significance of hyperlinks. It contrasts traditional information retrieval with web-specific approaches, emphasizing the need for effective ranking and relevance models. Various models, including Boolean and Vector models, are explored, along with their advantages and disadvantages in retrieving relevant information.

Uploaded by

harish sharma
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
16 views30 pages

Web Search

The document discusses the challenges and methodologies of web search and information retrieval, highlighting issues such as the quality of web content, the volume of documents, and the significance of hyperlinks. It contrasts traditional information retrieval with web-specific approaches, emphasizing the need for effective ranking and relevance models. Various models, including Boolean and Vector models, are explored, along with their advantages and disadvantages in retrieving relevant information.

Uploaded by

harish sharma
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 30

Web Search

 Goal is to find information relevant to a user’s


interests
 Challenge 1: A significant amount of content
on the web is not quality information
 Many pages contain nonsensical rants, etc.
 The web is full of misspellings, multiple languages,
etc.
 Many pages are designed not to convey information
– but to get a high ranking (e.g., “search engine
optimization”)
 Challenge 2: billions of documents
 Challenge 3: hyperlinks encode information

1
Our Discussion of Web
Search
 Begin with traditional information retrieval
 Document models
 Stemming and stop words
 Web-specific issues
 Crawlers and robots.txt
 Scalability
 Models for exploiting hyperlinks in ranking
 Google and PageRank
 Latent Semantic Indexing

2
Information Retrieval
 Traditional information retrieval is basically text search
 A corpus or body of text documents, e.g., in a document
collection in a library or on a CD
 Documents are generally high-quality and designed to convey
information
 Documents are assumed to have no structure beyond words
 Searches are generally based on meaningful phrases,
perhaps including predicates over categories, dates,
etc.
 The goal is to find the document(s) that best match the
search phrase, according to a search model
 Assumptions are typically different from Web: quality
text, limited-size corpus, no hyperlinks
3
Motivation for Information
Retrieval
 Information Retrieval (IR) is about:
 Representation
 Storage
 Organization of
 And access to “information items”
 Focus is on user’s “information need” rather than
a precise query:
 “March Madness” – Find information on college
basketball teams which: (1) are maintained by a US
university and (2) participate in the NCAA tournament
 Emphasis is on the retrieval of information (not
data)
4
Data vs. Information
Retrieval
 Data retrieval, analogous to database querying:
which docs contain a set of keywords?
 Well-defined, precise logical semantics
 A single erroneous object implies failure!
 Information retrieval:
 Information about a subject or topic
 Semantics is frequently loose; we want approximate
matches
 Small errors are tolerated (and in fact inevitable)
 IR system:
 Interpret contents of information items
 Generate a ranking which reflects relevance
 Notion of relevance is most important – needs a model

5
Basic Model
Docs Index Terms

doc

match
Information Need Ranking
?

query
6
Information Retrieval as a
Field
 IR addressed many issues in the last 20 years:
 Classification and categorization of documents
 Systems and languages for searching
 User interfaces and visualization of results
 Area was seen as of narrow interest – libraries,
mainly
 Sea-change event – the advent of the web:
 Universal “library”
 Free (low cost) universal access
 No central editorial board
 Many problems in finding information:
IR seen as key to finding the solutions!

7
The Full Info Retrieval
Process
Text
Browse
r / UI
user interest
Text

Text Processing and Modeling

logical view logical view

Query
user feedback Operations Indexing
Crawler
inverted index / Data
query
Access
Searching Index

retrieved docs Documents


(Web or DB)

ranked docs
Ranking
8
Terminology
 IR systems usually adopt index terms to
process queries
 Index term:
 a keyword or group of selected words
 any word (more general)
 Stemming might be used:
 connect: connecting, connection, connections
 An inverted index is built for the chosen
index terms

9
What’s a Meaningful Result?
 Matching at index term level is quite
imprecise
 Users are frequently dissatisfied
 One problem: users are generally poor at
posing queries
 Frequent dissatisfaction of Web users (who
often give single-keyword queries)
 Issue of deciding relevance is critical for IR
systems: ranking

10
Rankings
 A ranking is an ordering of the documents
retrieved that (hopefully) reflects the
relevance of the documents to the user query
 A ranking is based on fundamental premises
regarding the notion of relevance, such as:
 common sets of index terms
 sharing of weighted terms
 likelihood of relevance
 Each set of premisses leads to a distinct IR
model

11
Types of IR Models Set Theoretic
Fuzzy
Extended Boolean
Classic Models
boolean Algebraic
vector
U probabilistic Generalized Vector
s Retrieval: Lat. Semantic Index
e Adhoc Neural Networks
r Filtering
Structured Models
Probabilistic
T Non-Overlapping Lists
a Proximal Nodes Inference Network
s Belief Network
k Browsing
Browsing
Flat
Structure Guided
Hypertext
12
Classic IR Models – Basic
Concepts
 Each document represented by a set of
representative keywords or index terms
 An index term is a document word useful for
remembering the document main themes
 Traditionally, index terms were nouns
because nouns have meaning by themselves
 However, search engines assume that all
words are index terms (full text
representation)

13
Classic IR Models – Ranking
 Not all terms are equally useful for representing
the document contents: less frequent terms allow
identifying a narrower set of documents
 The importance of the index terms is represented
by weights associated to them
 Let
 ki be an index term
 dj be a document
 wij is a weight associated with (ki,dj)
 The weight wij quantifies the importance of the
index term for describing the document contents
14
Classic IR Models – Notation
ki is an index term (keyword)
dj is a document
t is the total number of docs
K = (k1, k2, …, kt) is the set of all index terms
wij >= 0 is a weight associated with (ki,dj)
wij = 0 indicates that term does not belong to
doc
vec(dj) = (w1j, w2j, …, wtj) is a weighted vector associated
with the document dj
gi(vec(dj)) = wij is a function which returns the weight
associated with pair (ki,dj)

15
Boolean Model
 Simple model based on set theory
 Queries specified as boolean expressions
 precise semantics
 neat formalism
 q = ka  (kb  kc)
 Terms are either present or absent. Thus,
wij  {0,1}
 An example query
q = ka  (kb  kc)
 Disjunctive normal form: vec(qdnf) = (1,1,1)  (1,1,0) 
(1,0,0)
 Conjunctive component: vec(qcc) = (1,1,0)

16
Boolean Model for Similarity
Ka Kb
q = ka  (kb  kc)
(1,1,0)
(1,0,0)
(1,1,1)
sim(q,dj) = 1 if  vec(qcc) s.t. (vec(qcc)  vec(qdnf))  (  k i,
gi(vec(dj)) = gi(vec(qcc))) 0 otherwise

{ Kc

17
Drawbacks of 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

18
Vector Model
 A refinement of the boolean model, which
focused strictly on exact matchines
 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

19
Vector Model
 Define:
wij > 0 whenever ki  dj
wiq >= 0 associated with the pair (ki,q)
vec(dj) = (w1j, w2j, ..., wtj)
vec(q) = (w1q, w2q, ..., wtq)
 With each term ki , associate a unit vector vec(i)
 The unit vectors vec(i) and vec(j) are assumed to be
orthonormal (i.e., index terms are assumed to occur
independently within the documents)
 The t unit vectors vec(i) form an orthonormal basis
for a t-dimensional space
 In this space, queries and documents are
represented as weighted vectors

20
Vector Model
j
dj


Sim(q,dj) = cos() q
= [vec(dj)  vec(q)] / |dj| * |q|
i
= [ wij * wiq] / |dj| * |q|

 Since wij > 0 and wiq > 0,


0 ≤ sim(q,dj) ≤ 1
 A document is retrieved even if it
matches the query terms only partially

21
Weights in the Vector Model
Sim(q,dj) = [ wij * wiq] / |dj| * |q|
 How do we compute the weights wij and wiq?
 A good weight must take into account two
effects:
 quantification of intra-document contents
(similarity)
 tf factor, the term frequency within a document
 quantification of inter-documents separation
(dissimilarity)
 idf factor, the inverse document frequency
wij = tf(i,j) * idf(i)

22
TF and IDF Factors
 Let:
N be the total number of docs in the collection
ni be the number of docs which contain ki
freq(i,j) raw frequency of ki within dj

 A normalized tf factor is given by


f(i,j) = freq(i,j) / max(freq(l,j))
where the maximum is computed over all terms which occur within
the document dj

 The idf factor is computed as


idf(i) = log (N / ni)
the log is used to make the values of tf and idf comparable.
It can also be interpreted as the amount of information associated
with the term ki

23
Vector Model k1
k2

Example 1 d2 d6
d7

d4 d5
d3
d1

k3

k1 k2 k3 q  dj
d1 1 0 1 2
d2 1 0 0 1
d3 0 1 1 2
d4 1 0 0 1
d5 1 1 1 3
d6 1 1 0 2
d7 0 1 0 1

q 1 1 1
24
Vector Model k1
k2

Example 1I d2 d6
d7

d4 d5
d3
d1

k3

k1 k2 k3 q  dj
d1 1 0 1 4
d2 1 0 0 1
d3 0 1 1 5
d4 1 0 0 1
d5 1 1 1 6
d6 1 1 0 3
d7 0 1 0 2

q 1 2 3
25
Vector Model k1
k2

Example III d2 d6
d7

d4 d5
d3
d1

k3

k1 k2 k3 q  dj
d1 2 0 1 5
d2 1 0 0 1
d3 0 1 3 11
d4 2 0 0 2
d5 1 2 4 17
d6 1 2 0 5
d7 0 5 0 10

q 1 2 3
26
Vector Model, Summarized
 The best term-weighting schemes tf-idf
weights:
wij = f(i,j) * log(N/ni)
 For the query term weights, a suggestion is
wiq = (0.5 + [0.5 * freq(i,q) / max(freq(l,q)]) *
log(N / ni)

 This model is very good in practice:


 tf-idf works well with general collections
 Simple and fast to compute
 Vector model is usually as good as the known
ranking alternatives
27
Pros & Cons of Vector Model
Advantages:
 term-weighting improves quality of the answer
set
 partial matching allows retrieval of docs that
approximate the query conditions
 cosine ranking formula sorts documents
according to degree of similarity to the query
Disadvantages:
 assumes independence of index terms; not
clear if this is a good or bad assumption

28
Comparison of Classic
Models
 Boolean model does not provide for partial
matches and is considered to be the weakest
classic model
 Some experiments indicate that the vector
model outperforms the third alternative, the
probabilistic model, in general
 Recent IR research has focused on improving
probabilistic models – but these haven’t made their
way to Web search
 Generally we use a variation of the vector
model in most text search systems

29
Next Time: The Web
 … And in particular, PageRank!

30

You might also like