1. Information Retrieval and Data Mining (AT71. 07) Comp. Sc. and Inf
Information Retrieval and Data Mining (AT71.07) Comp. Sc. and Inf. Mgmt. Asian Institute of Technology
Instructor: Prof. Sumanta Guha Slide Sources: Introduction to Information Retrieval book slides from Stanford University, adapted and supplemented Chapter 7: Computing scores in a complete search engine

2. CS276 Information Retrieval and Web Search
Christopher Manning and Prabhakar Raghavan
Lecture 7: Computing scores in a complete search engine

3. Recap: tf-idf weighting
The tf-idf weight of a term is the product of its tf weight and its idf weight.
Best known weighting scheme in information retrieval
Increases with the number of occurrences within a document
Increases with the rarity of the term in the collection

4. Recap: Queries as vectors
Ch. 6
Recap: 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

5. Recap: cosine(query,document)
Ch. 6
Recap: cosine(query,document)
Dot product
Unit vectors
cos(q,d) is the cosine similarity of q and d … or,
equivalently, the cosine of the angle between q and d.

6. This lecture Speeding up vector space ranking
Ch. 7
This lecture
Speeding up vector space ranking
Putting together a complete search system
Will require learning about a number of miscellaneous topics and heuristics

7. Computing cosine scores
Sec. 6.3
Computing cosine scores
Pre-calculated off-line.
Can traverse posting lists one
term at time – which is called
term-at-a-time scoring. Or can
traverse them concurrently
as in the INTERSECT algorithm
of Ch. 1 – which is called
document-at-a-time scoring
No need to divide by Length[q] as it is the same for all docs!
No need to store these per doc per posting list. Can be computed on-the-fly from the dft value at the head of the postings list and the tft,d value in the doc.
Priority queue=heap!

8. Efficient cosine ranking
Sec. 7.1
Efficient cosine ranking
Find the K docs in the collection “nearest” to the query  K largest query-doc cosines.
Efficient ranking:
Computing a single cosine efficiently.
Choosing the K largest cosine values efficiently.
Can we do this without computing all N cosines?

9. Efficient cosine ranking
Sec. 7.1
Efficient cosine ranking
What we’re doing in effect: solving the K-nearest neighbor problem for a query vector
In general, we do not know how to do this efficiently for high-dimensional spaces
But it is solvable for short queries, and standard indexes support this well

10. Special case – unweighted queries
Sec. 7.1
Special case – unweighted queries
No weighting on query terms
Assume each query term occurs only once
Then for ranking, don’t need to normalize query vector
Slight simplification of algorithm from Lecture 6

11. Faster cosine: unweighted query
Sec. 7.1
Faster cosine: unweighted query
Query terms occur only once +
no weighting on query terms
→ wt,q = 1, for all terms t in q.
ltc.bnn !

12. Computing the K largest cosines: selection vs. sorting
Sec. 7.1
Computing the K largest cosines: selection vs. sorting
Typically we want to retrieve the top K docs (in the cosine ranking for the query)
not to totally order all docs in the collection
Can we pick off docs with K highest cosines?
Let J = number of docs with nonzero cosines
We seek the K best of these J

13. Use heap for selecting top K
Sec. 7.1
Use heap for selecting top K
Heap is a binary tree in which each node’s value > the values of children
Takes 2J operations to construct a heap from J input elements, then each of K “winners” read off in 2log J steps.
For J=1M, K=100, this is about 10% of the cost of sorting. 1 .9 .3 .3 .8 .1 .1

14. Sec
Bottlenecks
Primary computational bottleneck in scoring: cosine computation
Can we avoid all this computation?
Yes, but may sometimes get it wrong
a doc not in the top K may creep into the list of K output docs
Is this such a bad thing?

15. Cosine similarity is only a proxy
Sec
Cosine similarity is only a proxy
User has a task and a query formulation
Cosine matches docs to query
Thus cosine is anyway a proxy for user happiness
If we get a list of K docs “close” to the top K by cosine measure, should be ok

16. Sec
Generic approach
Find a set A of contenders, with K < |A| << N
A does not necessarily contain the top K, but has many docs from among the top K
Return the top K docs in A
Think of A as pruning non-contenders
The same approach is also used for other (non-cosine) scoring functions
Will look at several schemes following this approach
All docs
Contenders
“Actual” top K

17. Sec
Index elimination
Basic algorithm FastCosineScore of Fig 7.1 only considers docs containing at least one query term, because docs not containing any query term will get score 0 (check!).
Take this further:
Only consider high-idf query terms
Only consider docs containing many query terms

18. High-idf query terms only
Sec
High-idf query terms only
For a query such as catcher in the rye
Only accumulate scores from catcher and rye
Intuition: in and the contribute little to the scores and so don’t alter rank-ordering much
Benefit:
Postings of low-idf terms have many docs  these (many) docs get eliminated from set A of contenders

19. Docs containing many query terms
Sec
Docs containing many query terms
Any doc with at least one query term is a candidate for the top K output list
For multi-term queries, only compute scores for docs containing several of the query terms
Say, at least 3 out of 4
Imposes a “soft conjunction” on queries seen on web search engines (early Google)
Easy to implement in postings traversal

20. 3 of 4 query terms Scores only computed for docs 8, 16 and 32. Antony
Sec
3 of 4 query terms
Antony 3 4 8 16 32 64
128
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64
128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16 32
Scores only computed for docs 8, 16 and 32.

21. Sec
Champion lists
Precompute for each dictionary term t, the r docs of highest weight in t’s postings (for tf-idf weighting these are the docs with highest tf values for term t)
Call this the champion list for t
(aka fancy list or top docs for t)
Note that r has to be chosen at index build time
Thus, it’s possible that r < K
At query time, only compute scores for docs in the champion list of some query term
Take union of the champion lists for each term in the query
Pick the K top-scoring docs from amongst these

22. Sec
Exercises
How do Champion Lists relate to Index Elimination? Can they be used together?
How can Champion Lists be implemented in an inverted index?
Note that the champion list has nothing to do with small docIDs

23. Sec
Static quality scores
We want top-ranking documents to be both relevant and authoritative
Relevance is being modeled by cosine scores
Authority is typically a query-independent property of a document
Examples of authority signals
Wikipedia among websites
Articles in certain newspapers
A paper with many citations
Many diggs, Y!buzzes or del.icio.us marks
(Pagerank)
Quantitative

24. Sec
Modeling authority
Assign to each document a query-independent quality score in [0,1] to each document d
Denote this by g(d)
Thus, a quantity like the number of citations is scaled into [0,1]
Exercise: suggest a formula for this.

25. Sec
Net score
Consider a simple total score combining cosine relevance and authority
net-score(q,d) = g(d) + cosine(q,d)
Can use some other linear combination than an equal weighting
Indeed, any function of the two “signals” of user happiness – more later
Now we seek the top K docs by net score

26. Top K by net score – fast methods
Sec
Top K by net score – fast methods
First idea: Order all postings lists by decreasing g(d)!
Key: this is a common ordering for all postings.
Therefore, g(d) can replace docID in the INTERSECT postings list algorithm from the first chapter! Why? Because all that is required for the intersect (= merge) to work is a common ordering of the two lists.
Thus, can concurrently traverse query terms’ postings for
Postings intersection
Cosine score computation
Exercise: write pseudocode for cosine score computation if postings are ordered by g(d)

27. Static quality-ordered index
g(1) = 0.25, g(2) = 0.5, g(3) = 1

28. Why order postings by g(d)?
Sec
Why order postings by g(d)?
Under g(d)-ordering, top-scoring docs (using net-score(q,d) = g(d) + cosine(q,d) )likely to appear early in postings traversal
In time-bound applications (say, we have to return whatever search results we can in 50 ms), this allows us to stop postings traversal early
Short of computing scores for all docs in postings

29. Champion lists in g(d)-ordering
Sec
Champion lists in g(d)-ordering
Can combine champion lists with g(d)-ordering
Maintain for each term a champion list of the r docs with highest g(d) + tf-idftd
Seek top-K results from only the docs in these champion lists

30. Sec
High and low lists
For each term, we maintain two postings lists called high and low
Think of high as the champion list
When traversing postings on a query, only traverse high lists first
If we get more than K docs, select the top K and stop
Else proceed to get docs from the low lists
Can be used even for simple cosine scores, without global quality g(d)
A means for segmenting index into two tiers

31. Impact-ordered postings
Sec
Impact-ordered postings
We only want to compute scores for docs for which wft,d is high enough
We sort each postings list by wft,d
Now: not all postings in a common order!
How do we compute scores in order to pick off top K?
Two ideas follow

32. Sec
1. Early termination
When traversing t’s postings, stop early after either
a fixed number of r docs
wft,d drops below some threshold
Take the union of the resulting sets of docs
One from the postings of each query term
Compute only the scores for docs in this union

33. 2. idf-ordered terms When considering the postings of query terms
Sec
2. idf-ordered terms
When considering the postings of query terms
Look at them in order of decreasing idf
High idf terms likely to contribute most to score
As we update score contribution from each query term
Stop if doc scores relatively unchanged
Can apply to cosine or some other net scores

34. Cluster pruning: preprocessing
Sec
Cluster pruning: preprocessing
Pick N docs at random: call these leaders
For every other doc, pre-compute nearest leader
Docs attached to a leader: its followers;
Likely: each leader has ~ N followers.

35. Cluster pruning: query processing
Sec
Cluster pruning: query processing
Process a query as follows:
Given query Q, find its nearest leader L.
Seek K nearest docs from among L’s followers.

36. Sec
Visualization
Query
Leader
Follower

37. Why use random sampling
Sec
Why use random sampling
Fast
Leaders reflect data distribution

38. Sec
General variants
Have each follower attached to b1=3 (say) nearest leaders.
From query, find b2=4 (say) nearest leaders and their followers.
So, basic cluster pruning corresponds to b1 = b2 = 1.
Can recurse on leader/follower construction → treat each cluster as a space, find subclusters, repeat, …

39. Sec
Exercises
To find the nearest leader in step 1, how many cosine computations do we do?
Why did we have N in the first place?
What is the effect of the constants b1, b2 on the previous slide?
Devise an example where this is likely to fail – i.e., we miss one of the K nearest docs.
Likely under random sampling.

40. Parametric and zone indexes
Sec. 6.1
Parametric and zone indexes
Thus far, a doc has been a sequence of terms
In fact documents have multiple parts, some with special semantics:
Author
Title
Date of publication
Language
Format
etc.
These constitute the metadata about a document

41. Fields We sometimes wish to search by these metadata
Sec. 6.1
Fields
We sometimes wish to search by these metadata
E.g., find docs authored by William Shakespeare in the year 1601, containing alas poor Yorick
Year = 1601 is an example of a field
Also, author last name = shakespeare, etc
Field or parametric index: postings for each field value
Sometimes build range trees (e.g., for dates)
Field query typically treated as conjunction
(doc must be authored by shakespeare)

42. Sec. 6.1
Zone
A zone is a region of the doc that can contain an arbitrary amount of text e.g.,
Title
Abstract
References …
Build inverted indexes on zones as well to permit querying
E.g., “find docs with merchant in the title zone and matching the query gentle rain”

43. Sec. 6.1
Example zone indexes
Encode zones in dictionary vs. postings.

44. Tiered indexes Break postings up into a hierarchy of lists
Sec
Tiered indexes
Break postings up into a hierarchy of lists
Most important …
Least important
Can be done by g(d) or another measure
Inverted index thus broken up into tiers of decreasing importance
At query time use top tier unless it fails to yield K docs
If so drop to lower tiers

45. Sec
Example tiered index

46. Sec
Query term proximity
Free text queries: just a set of terms typed into the query box – common on the web
Users prefer docs in which query terms occur within close proximity of each other
Let w be the smallest window in a doc containing all query terms, e.g.,
For the query strained mercy the smallest window in the doc The quality of mercy is not strained is 4 (words)
Would like scoring function to take this into account – how?

47. Sec
Query parsers
Free text query from user may in fact spawn one or more queries to the indexes, e.g. query rising interest rates
Run the query as a phrase query
If <K docs contain the phrase rising interest rates, run the two phrase queries rising interest and interest rates
If we still have <K docs, run the vector space query consisting of three individual terms rising interest rates
Rank matching docs by vector space scoring
This sequence is issued by a query parser

48. Sec
Aggregate scores
We’ve seen that score functions can combine cosine, static quality, proximity, etc.
How do we know the best combination?
Some applications – expert-tuned
Increasingly common: machine-learned!

49. Putting it all together
Sec
Putting it all together

50. Exercises
Exercise 7.1: We suggested above that the postings for static quality ordering be in decreasing order of g(d). Why do we use the decreasing rather than the increasing order? Exercise 7.2: When discussing champion lists, we simply used the r documents with the largest tf values to create the champion list for t. But when considering global champion lists, we used idf as well, identifying documents with the largest values of g(d) + tf-idft,d. Why do we differentiate between these two cases? Exercise 7.3: If we were to only have one-term queries, explain why the use of global champion lists with r = K suffices for identifying the K highest scoring documents. What is a simple modification to this idea if we were to only have s-term queries for any fixed integer s > 1? Exercise 7.4: Explain how the common global ordering by g(d) values in all high and low lists helps make the score computation efficient.

51. Exercises
Exercise 7.5: Consider again the data of Exercise 6.23 with nnn.atc for the query-dependent scoring. Suppose that we were given static quality scores of 1 for Doc1 and 2 for Doc2. Determine under Equation (7.2) what ranges of static quality score for Doc3 result in it being the first, second or third result for the query best car insurance. Exercise 7.6: Sketch the frequency-ordered postings for the data in Figure 6.9. Exercise 7.7: Let the static quality scores for Doc1, Doc2 and Doc3 in Figure 6.11 be respectively 0.25, 0.5 and 1. Sketch the postings for impact ordering when each postings list is ordered by the sum of the static quality score and the Euclidean normalized tf values in Figure 6.11.

52. Exercises
Exercise 7.8: The nearest-neighbor problem in the plane is the following: given a set of N data points on the plane, we preprocess them into some data structure such that, given a query point Q, we seek the point in N that is closest to Q in Euclidean distance. Clearly cluster pruning can be used as an approach to the nearest-neighbor problem in the plane, if we wished to avoid computing the distance from Q to every one of the query points. Devise a simple example on the plane so that with two leaders, the answer returned by cluster pruning is incorrect (it is not the data point closest to Q). Exercise 7.9: Explain how the postings intersection algorithm first introduced in Section 1.3 can be adapted to find the smallest integer ω that contains all query terms. Exercise 7.10 Adapt this procedure to work when not all query terms are present in a document.