Introduction to

Information Retrieval
Introducing Information Retrieval
and Web Search
 Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval (IR) is finding material
(usually documents) of an unstructured nature
(usually text) that satisfies an information need
from within large collections (usually stored on
computers).

These days we frequently think first of web search,

but there are many other cases:
E-mail search
Searching your laptop
Corporate knowledge bases
Legal information retrieval

2
Unstructured (text) vs. structured (database)
data in the mid-nineties

3
Unstructured (text) vs. structured (database)
data today

4
 Sec. 1.1

Basic assumptions of Information Retrieval

Collection: A set of documents

Assume it is a static collection for the moment

Goal: Retrieve documents with information

that is relevant to the users information need
and helps the user complete a task

5
 The classic search model
User task Get rid of mice in a
politically correct way

Misconception?
Info need
Info about removing mice
without killing them

Misformulation?

Query Searc
how trap mice alive
h

Search
engine

Query Results
Collection
refinement
 Sec. 1.1

How good are the retrieved docs?

Precision : Fraction of retrieved docs that are
relevant to the users information need
Recall : Fraction of relevant docs in collection
that are retrieved

More precise definitions and measurements to

follow later

7
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Term-document incidence matrices
 Sec. 1.1

Unstructured data in 1620

Which plays of Shakespeare contain the words
Brutus AND Caesar but NOT Calpurnia?
One could grep all of Shakespeares plays for
Brutus and Caesar, then strip out lines containing
Calpurnia?
Why is that not the answer?
Slow (for large corpora)
NOT Calpurnia is non-trivial
Other operations (e.g., find the word Romans near
countrymen) not feasible
Ranked retrieval (best documents to return)
Later lectures
9
 Sec. 1.1

Term-document incidence matrices

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

Brutus AND Caesar BUT NOT 1 if play contains

Calpurnia word, 0 otherwise
 Sec. 1.1

Incidence vectors
So we have a 0/1 vector for each term.
To answer query: take the vectors for Brutus,
Caesar and Calpurnia (complemented)
bitwise AND.
110100 AND
110111 AND Antony
Antony and Cleopatra
1
Julius Caesar
1
The Tempest
0
Hamlet
0
Othello
0
Macbeth
1

101111 =
Brutus 1 1 0 1 0 0
Caesar 1 1 0 1 1 1
Calpurnia 0 1 0 0 0 0

100100
Cleopatra 1 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 1 0 1 1 1 1
worser 1 0 1 1 1 0

11
 Sec. 1.1

Answers to query

Antony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene ii

Agrippa [Aside to DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS]: Why, Enobarbus,
When Antony found Julius Caesar dead,
He cried almost to roaring; and he wept
When at Philippi he found Brutus slain.

Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii

Lord Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar I was killed i the
Capitol; Brutus killed me.

12
 Sec. 1.1

Bigger collections
Consider N = 1 million documents, each with
about 1000 words.
Avg 6 bytes/word including
spaces/punctuation
6GB of data in the documents.
Say there are M = 500K distinct terms among
these.

13
 Sec. 1.1

Cant build the matrix

500K x 1M matrix has half-a-trillion 0s and 1s.

But it has no more than one billion 1s. Why?

matrix is extremely sparse.

Whats a better representation?

We only record the 1 positions.

14
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
The Inverted Index
The key data structure underlying
modern IR
 Sec. 1.2

Inverted index
For each term t, we must store a list of all
documents that contain t.
Identify each doc by a docID, a document serial
number
Can
Brutus we used fixed-size
1 2 arrays
4 11 for
31 this?
45 173 174
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101

What happens if the word Caesar

is added to document 14?
16
 Sec. 1.2

Inverted index
We need variable-size postings lists
On disk, a continuous run of postings is normal
and best
Posting
In memory, can use linked lists or variable length
arrays
Some tradeoffs in 1size/ease
2 4 11 31 45 173 174
Brutus
of insertion
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101

Dictionary Postings
Sorted by docID (more later on why).
17
 Sec. 1.2

Inverted index construction

Documents to Friends, Romans, countrymen.
be indexed

Tokenizer

Token stream Friends Romans Countrymen

Linguistic modules

Modified tokens friend roman countryman

Indexer friend 2 4
roman 1 2
Inverted index
countryman 13 16
 Initial stages of text processing
Tokenization
Cut character sequence into word tokens
Deal with Johns, a state-of-the-art solution
Normalization
Map text and query term to same form
You want U.S.A. and USA to match
Stemming
We may wish different forms of a root to match
authorize, authorization
Stop words
We may omit very common words (or not)
the, a, to, of
 Sec. 1.2

Indexer steps: Token sequence

Sequence of (Modified token, Document ID) pairs.

Doc 1 Doc 2

I did enact Julius So let it be with

Caesar I was killed Caesar. The noble
i the Capitol; Brutus hath told you
Brutus killed me. Caesar was ambitious
 Sec. 1.2

Indexer steps: Sort

Sort by terms
And then docID

Core indexing step

 Sec. 1.2

Indexer steps: Dictionary & Postings

Multiple term entries
in a single document
are merged.
Split into Dictionary
and Postings
Doc. frequency
information is added.

Why frequency?
Will discuss later.
 Sec. 1.2

Where do we pay in storage?

Lists of
docIDs

Terms
and
counts
IR system
implementation
How do we
index efficiently?
How much
storage do we
need?
Pointers 23