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N Gram Data Structure in Information Retrieval Systems

N-gram models are essential data structures in information retrieval systems that analyze sequences of text or speech, supporting tasks like query prediction and document indexing. They come in various forms, including unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams, each capturing different levels of language context. Despite challenges like data sparsity and storage overhead, n-grams remain vital for understanding language patterns and are being integrated with modern machine learning techniques.

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Navaneeth Nani
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96 views8 pages

N Gram Data Structure in Information Retrieval Systems

N-gram models are essential data structures in information retrieval systems that analyze sequences of text or speech, supporting tasks like query prediction and document indexing. They come in various forms, including unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams, each capturing different levels of language context. Despite challenges like data sparsity and storage overhead, n-grams remain vital for understanding language patterns and are being integrated with modern machine learning techniques.

Uploaded by

Navaneeth Nani
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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N-Gram Data Structure in

Information Retrieval
Systems
Presented by Navaneeth

N-gram models are foundational data structures in information retrieval


systems, used to analyze and represent sequences of text or speech. They
capture contiguous sequences of n items (usually words or characters) from
a given text corpus, enabling systems to predict and understand language
patterns. In information retrieval, n-grams support tasks such as query
prediction, spelling correction, and document indexing by providing
contextual relationships within the data.

by Navaneeth indarapu
Understanding N-Grams:
Definition and Types
Unigrams Bigrams
Single word sequences. They Pairs of consecutive words.
represent the simplest form of Bigrams capture short-range
n-grams and capture individual dependencies such as common
lexical units without context. phrases and word collocations.

Trigrams and Higher


Sequences of three or more words. They provide richer contextual
information and enable modeling of more complex language
structures.
Construction of N-Gram
Models
Tokenization
Split the raw text into tokens such as words or characters,
forming the basic units for n-gram extraction.

N-Gram Extraction
Generate sequences of n contiguous tokens to form the n-
grams, capturing structural patterns.

Frequency Counting
Count occurrences of each n-gram, which quantifies their
relevance and importance within the corpus.
Applications in Information Retrieval
Query Expansion Spell Correction Document Indexing

N-grams enhance user queries by By analyzing probable n-gram N-grams help index documents
suggesting relevant phrases based on sequences, systems can detect and efficiently by capturing meaningful
common co-occurrences, improving correct misspelled words to refine sequences, supporting fast and accurate
search precision. retrieval results. content matching.
Advantages of N-Gram
Data Structures
Language Context Simplicity and
Capture Efficiency
They provide valuable N-gram models are
contextual cues beyond straightforward to
single words, enabling implement and fast to
better linguistic compute, even on large
representation. datasets.

Versatility
Applicable across various languages and tasks in natural language
processing and information retrieval.
Challenges and Limitations
Sparsity Problem Limited Long-range
Context
Higher-order n-grams often
suffer from data sparsity, N-grams capture fixed-length
making it difficult to estimate sequences and may fail to
probabilities accurately. model dependencies spanning
beyond the chosen n.

Storage Overhead
Storing and managing large n-gram datasets can be resource-intensive
for extensive corpora.
Techniques to Mitigate Challenges
Backoff Models
These models back off to lower-order n-

Smoothing Methods 2 grams when higher-order statistics are


unreliable, improving robustness.
Techniques like Laplace and Kneser-
Ney smoothing help allocate 1
probabilities to unseen n-grams, Pruning
addressing sparsity.
3 Remove rare and less informative n-grams
to reduce storage needs and improve
processing speed.
Summary and Future
Perspectives
Core Role of N-Grams
Despite emergence of advanced models, n-grams remain crucial for
understanding language patterns in information retrieval.

Integration with Modern ML


They complement machine learning methods by providing
structured input features and baseline heuristics.

Ongoing Research
Exploration continues on hybrid models combining n-grams
with neural embeddings for enhanced retrieval performance.

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