1. Information Retrieval
Lecture 2: Dictionary and Postings

2. Recall basic indexing pipeline
Documents to
be indexed.
Friends, Romans, countrymen.
Tokenizer
Token stream.
Friends
Romans
Countrymen
Linguistic modules
Modified tokens.
friend
roman
countryman
Indexer
Inverted index.
friend
roman
countryman 2 4 13 16 1

3. What character set is in use?
Parsing a document
What format is it in?
pdf/word/excel/html?
What language is it in?
What character set is in use?
Each of these is a classification problem
But these tasks are often done heuristically …

4. Complications: Format/language
Documents being indexed can include docs from many different languages
A single index may have to contain terms of several languages.
Sometimes a document or its components can contain multiple languages/formats
French with a German pdf attachment.
What is a unit document?
A file?

5. Tokenization

6. Tokenization Input: “Books, Chapters and Lecture” Output: Tokens
Each such token is now a candidate for an index entry, after further processing
But what are valid tokens to emit?

7. Issues in tokenization:
India’s capital 
India? Indias ? India’s ?
Hewlett-Packard  Hewlett and Packard as two tokens?
State-of-the-art: break up hyphenated sequence.
co-education ?
It’s effective to get the user to put in possible hyphens
New Delhi: one token or two? How do you decide it is one token?

8. Numbers
18/1/07 Jan. 18, 2007
1400 B.C.
B-52
authentication key is 324a3df234cb23e
Often, don’t index as text.
But often very useful: think about things like looking up error codes on the web (we can use n-grams)
Will often index “meta-data” separately
Creation date, format, etc.

9. Tokenization: Language issues
L'ensemble  one token or two?
L ? L’ ? Le ?
Want l’ensemble to match with un ensemble

10. Tokenization: language issues
Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words:
莎拉波娃现在居住在美国东南部的佛罗里达。
Not always guaranteed a unique tokenization
Further complicated in Japanese, with multiple alphabets intermingled
Dates/amounts in multiple formats

11. Tokenization: language issues
Urdu, Arabic (or Hebrew) is basically written right to left, but with certain items like numbers written left to right
Words are separated, but letter forms within a word form complex ligatures
استقلت الجزائر في سنة 1962 بعد 132 عاما من الاحتلال الفرنسي.
‘Algeria achieved its independence in 1962 after 132 years of French occupation.’

12. Normalization
Need to “normalize” terms in indexed text as well as query terms into the same form
We want to match U.S.A. and USA
We most commonly implicitly define equivalence classes of terms
e.g., by deleting periods in a term
Alternative is to do asymmetric expansion:
Enter: window Search: window, windows
Enter: windows Search: Windows, windows
Enter: Windows Search: Windows

13. Normalization: other languages
Accents: résumé vs. resume.
Most important criterion:
How are your users like to write their queries for these words?
Even in languages that have accents, users often may not type them

14. Normalization: other languages
Need to “normalize” indexed text as well as query terms into the same form

15. Case folding Reduce all letters to lower case
exception: upper case (in mid-sentence?)
e.g., General Motors
SAIL vs. sail
Often best to lower case everything, since users will use lowercase regardless of ‘correct’ capitalization…

16. Stop words
With a stop list, you exclude from dictionary entirely the commonest words. Intuition:
They take a lot of space: ~30% of postings for top 30
They have little semantic content: the, a, and, to, be
But the trend is away from doing this:
You need them for:
Phrase queries: “President of India”
Various song titles, etc.: “Let it be”, “To be or not to be”
“Relational” queries: “flights to Bangalore”

17. Thesauri and soundex Handle synonyms and homonyms
Hand-constructed equivalence classes
e.g., car = automobile
Saw , bank
Rewrite to form equivalence classes
Index such equivalences
When the document contains automobile, index it under car as well (usually, also vice-versa)
Or expand query?
When the query contains automobile, look under car as well

18. Soundex
Traditional class of heuristics to expand a query into phonetic equivalents
Language specific – mainly for names
E.g., chebyshev  tchebycheff

19. Lemmatization Reduce inflectional/variant forms to base form E.g.,
am, are, is  be
car, cars, car's, cars'  car
the boy's cars are different colors  the boy car be different color
Lemmatization implies doing “proper” reduction to dictionary headword form

20. Stemming Reduce terms to their “roots” before indexing
“Stemming” suggest crude affix chopping
language dependent
e.g., automate(s), automatic, automation all reduced to automat.
for exampl compress and
compress ar both accept
as equival to compress
for example compressed
and compression are both
accepted as equivalent to
compress.

21. Porter’s algorithm Widely known algorithm for stemming English
Results suggest at least as good as other stemming options
Conventions + 5 phases of reductions
phases applied sequentially
each phase consists of a set of commands
sample convention: Of the rules in a compound command, select the one that applies to the longest suffix.

22. Typical rules in Porter
Rules take the general form :
If a word ends in “ies” but not in eies” or “aies” then “ies”  “y”
sses  ss
ies  i
ational  ate
tional  tion
Weight of word sensitive rules
(m>1) ation → null
excitation → excit
nation → nation

23. Porter Stemmer Consists of condition / action rules
Condition may be on
- stems
- suffix
- rules

24. Conditions Suffix: (current_suffix == pattern) Rule: (rule was used)
Stem Conditions
1. Measure (m) : no. of VC sequence
m = 0 (e.g. tree), m = 1 (e.g. trees, oak)
m = 2 (e.g. private)
2. *<X> - the stem ends wit a given letter X
3. *v* - the stem contains a vowel
4. *d stem ends in a double consonant
Suffix: (current_suffix == pattern)
Rule: (rule was used)

25. old_suffix  new _suffix
Actions rewrite rules of the form:
old_suffix  new _suffix
The rules are divided into steps:
The rules in a step are examined in a sequence, and only one rule from a step can apply.
Step1a rules: ssess  ss, ies  I, ss ss, s NULL
1 b rules” (m>0) eed  ee (e.g. feed  feed, agreed  agree), (*v*) ed  NULL (e.g. plastered  plaster) , (*v*) ing  Null (motring  motor, sing  sing), at  ate (e.g. conflat (ed)  conflate)

26. Step 1c: (*v*) y i (e.g. happy  happi, sky  ski)
Step 2 rules:
(m>0) ational  ate (e.g. relational  relate)
Step 3 rules: (m>0) cate  ic, (m>0) ative  null

27. Stemmers are not perfect:
Organization  organ
University  universe
Policy  police

28. Other stemmers
Other stemmers exist, e.g., Lovins stemmer
Single-pass, longest suffix removal (about 250 rules)
Motivated by linguistics as well as IR
Full morphological analysis – at most modest benefits for retrieval
Do stemming and other normalizations help?
Often very mixed results: really help recall for some queries but harm precision on others

29. Language-specificity
Many of the above features embody transformations that are
Language-specific and
Often, application-specific
These are “plug-in” addenda to the indexing process
Both open source and commercial plug-ins available for handling these

30. Faster postings merges: Skip pointers

31. Recall basic merge
Walk through the two postings simultaneously, in time linear in the total number of postings entries 2 4 8 16 32 64
128
Brutus
Caesar 2 8 1 2 3 5 8 17 21 31
If the list lengths are m and n, the merge takes O(m+n)
operations.
Can we do better?
Yes, if index isn’t changing too fast.

32. Augment postings with skip pointers (at indexing time)16
128
128 2 4 8 16 32 64 31 1 2 3 5 8 17 21 8 31
Why?
To skip postings that will not figure in the search results.
How?
Where do we place skip pointers?

33. Query processing with skip pointers16
128
When we get to 16 on the top list, we see that its
successor is 32.
128 2 4 8 16 32 64 31 1 2 3 5 8 17 21 8 31
But the skip successor of 8 on the lower list is 31, so
we can skip ahead past the intervening postings.
Suppose we’ve stepped through the lists until we process 8 on each list.

34. Where do we place skips? Tradeoff:
More skips  shorter skip spans  more likely to skip. But lots of comparisons to skip pointers.
Fewer skips  few pointer comparison, but then long skip spans  few successful skips.

35. Placing skips
Simple heuristic: for postings of length L, use L evenly-spaced skip pointers.
This ignores the distribution of query terms.
Easy if the index is relatively static; harder if L keeps changing because of updates.
This definitely used to help; with modern hardware it may not (Bahle et al. 2002)
The cost of loading a bigger postings list outweighs the gain from quicker in memory merging

36. Phrase queries

37. Phrase queries
Want to answer queries such as “Allahabad university” – as a phrase
Thus the sentence “I went to university of Allahabad” is not a match.
The concept of phrase queries has proven easily understood by users; about 10% of web queries are phrase queries
No longer suffices to store only
<term : docs> entries

38. A first attempt: Biword indexes
Index every consecutive pair of terms in the text as a phrase
For example the text “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” would generate the biwords
Each of these biwords is now a dictionary term
Two-word phrase query-processing is now immediate.

39. In TREC conferences, the method used for phrase extraction is as follows:
1. Any pair of adjacent non-stop words is regarded a potential phrase.
2. Final list of phrases is composed of those pairs of words that occur in, say, 25 or more documents in the collection.

40. Can have false positives!
Longer phrase queries
Longer phrases are processed as we did with wild-cards:
Information Retrieval System can be broken into the Boolean query on biwords:
Information Retrieval AND Retrieval System
Without the docs, we cannot verify that the docs matching the above Boolean query do contain the phrase.
Can have false positives!

41. Extended biwords Parse the indexed text and perform POS-tagging (T).
Bucket the terms into (say) Nouns (N) and articles/prepositions (X).
Now deem any string of terms of the form NX*N to be an extended biword.
Each such extended biword is now made a term in the dictionary.
Example: ball in the room
N X X N
Query processing: parse it into N’s and X’s
Segment query into enhanced biwords
Look up index

42. Issues for biword indexes
False positives, as noted before
Index blowup due to bigger dictionary
For extended biword index, parsing longer queries into conjunctions:
E.g., the query tangerine trees and marmalade skies is parsed into
tangerine trees AND trees and marmalade AND marmalade skies
Not standard solution (for all biwords)

43. Phrase Normalization Solution #1
Extraction {NN} of {IN} Roots {NNS}
Survey {NN} of {IN} trend {NNP} of {IN} Development {NNP}
Systematic {JJ} classification {NN} of {IN} devices {NNS}

44. Soundex Letters Code 1 2 d t 3 l 4 m n 5 r 6
Keep the first letter constant
Code the rests letter into digits as shown in table
Ignore letters with same Soundex digit
Eliminate all zeros
Truncate or pad with zeros to one initial letter and three digits
Letters
Code
a e h i o u w y
b f p v 1
c g j k q s x z 2
d t 3 l 4
m n 5 r 6
Soundex Phonetic code

45. Soundex Example: Dickson, Dikson, Dixon
Developed by Odell and Russell in 1918 and used in US census to match American English names
Soundex fails on two names with different initials (e.g.: Karlson, Carlson)
Also in other cases (e.g. Rodgers, Rogers)

46. Solution 2: Positional indexes
Store, for each term, entries of the form:
<number of docs containing term;
doc1: position1, position2 … ;
doc2: position1, position2 … ;
etc.>

47. Positional index example
<be: 50647;
1: 7, 18, 33, 72, 86, 231;
2: 3, 149;
4: 17, 191, 291, 430, 434;
5: 363, 367, …>
Which of docs 1,2,4,5
could contain “to be
or not to be”?
Can compress position values/offsets
Nevertheless, this expands postings storage substantially

48. Processing a phrase query
Extract inverted index entries for each distinct term: to, be, or, not.
Merge their doc:position lists to enumerate all positions with “to be or not to be”.
to: 2:1,17,74,222,551; 4:8,16,190,429,433; 7:13,23,191; ...
be: 1:17,19; 4:17,191,291,430,434; 5:14,19,101; ...
Same general method for proximity searches

49. Proximity queries
Clearly, positional indexes can be used for such queries; biword indexes cannot.

50. Positional index size You can compress position values/offsets
Nevertheless, a positional index expands postings storage substantially
Nevertheless, it is now standardly used because of the power and usefulness of phrase and proximity queries … whether used explicitly or implicitly in a ranking retrieval system.

51. Positional index size
Need an entry for each occurrence, not just once per document
Index size depends on average document size
Average web page has <1000 terms
Consider a term with frequency 0.1%
100 1
100,000
1000
Positional postings
Postings
Document size

52. Rules of thumb
A positional index is 2–4 as large as a non-positional index
Positional index size 35–50% of volume of original text

53. Combination Schemes These two approaches can be profitably combined
For particular phrases (“Michael Jackson”, “Britney Spears”) it is inefficient to keep on merging positional postings lists
Even more so for phrases like “The Who”