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 user’s 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 user’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 Sec. 1.1

Can’t build the matrix

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

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

– matrix is extremely sparse.

• What’s a better representation?

– We only record the 1 positions.

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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 we used fixed-size arrays for this?
Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 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
– In memory, can use linked lists or variable length
arrays Posting
• Some tradeoffs in size/ease of insertion
Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101

Dictionary Postings
Sorted by docID (more later on why).
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 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 “John’s”, 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
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Query processing with an inverted index
 Sec. 1.3

The index we just built

• How do we process a query? Our focus

– Later - what kinds of queries can we process?

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 Sec. 1.3

Query processing: AND

• Consider processing the query:
Brutus AND Caesar
– Locate Brutus in the Dictionary;
• Retrieve its postings.
– Locate Caesar in the Dictionary;
• Retrieve its postings.
– “Merge” the two postings (intersect the document
sets): 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 Brutus
1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 Caesar

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 Sec. 1.3

The 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
1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 Caesar

If the list lengths are x and y, the merge takes O(x+y)

operations.
Crucial: postings sorted by docID.
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Intersecting two postings lists
(a “merge” algorithm)

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Introduction to
Information Retrieval
The Boolean Retrieval Model
& Extended Boolean Models
 Sec. 1.3

Boolean queries: Exact match

• The Boolean retrieval model is being able to ask a

query that is a Boolean expression:
– Boolean Queries are queries using AND, OR and NOT
to join query terms
• Views each document as a set of words
• Is precise: document matches condition or not.
– Perhaps the simplest model to build an IR system on
• Primary commercial retrieval tool for 3 decades.
• Many search systems you still use are Boolean:
– Email, library catalog, Mac OS X Spotlight
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 Sec. 1.4

Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/

• Largest commercial (paying subscribers)

legal search service (started 1975; ranking
added 1992; new federated search added
2010)
• Tens of terabytes of data; ~700,000 users
• Majority of users still use boolean queries
• Example query:
– What is the statute of limitations in cases
involving the federal tort claims act?
– LIMIT! /3 STATUTE ACTION /S FEDERAL /2
TORT /3 CLAIM
• /3 = within 3 words, /S = in same sentence
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 Sec. 1.4

Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/

• Another example query:

– Requirements for disabled people to be able to
access a workplace
– disabl! /p access! /s work-site work-place
(employment /3 place
• Note that SPACE is disjunction, not conjunction!
• Long, precise queries; proximity operators;
incrementally developed; not like web search
• Many professional searchers still like Boolean
search
– You know exactly what you are getting
• But that doesn’t mean it actually works better….
 Sec. 1.3

Boolean queries:
More general merges
• Exercise: Adapt the merge for the queries:
Brutus AND NOT Caesar
Brutus OR NOT Caesar

• Can we still run through the merge in time

O(x+y)? What can we achieve?

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 Sec. 1.3

Merging
What about an arbitrary Boolean formula?
(Brutus OR Caesar) AND NOT
(Antony OR Cleopatra)
• Can we always merge in “linear” time?
– Linear in what?
• Can we do better?

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 Sec. 1.3

Query optimization
• What is the best order for query
processing?
• Consider a query that is an AND of n terms.
• For each of the n terms, get its postings,
then AND them together.
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 16 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16

Query: Brutus AND Calpurnia AND Caesar 35

 Sec. 1.3

Query optimization example

• Process in order of increasing freq:
– start with smallest set, then keep cutting further.

This is why we kept

document freq. in dictionary

Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 16 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16

Execute the query as (Calpurnia AND Brutus) AND Caesar.

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 Sec. 1.3

More general optimization

• e.g., (madding OR crowd) AND (ignoble OR
strife)
• Get doc. freq.’s for all terms.
• Estimate the size of each OR by the sum of its
doc. freq.’s (conservative).
• Process in increasing order of OR sizes.

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 Exercise
• Recommend a query
processing order for

(tangerine OR trees) AND

Term Freq
(marmalade OR skies) AND eyes 213312
(kaleidoscope OR eyes) kaleidoscope 87009
marmalade 107913
• Which two terms should we skies 271658
process first? tangerine 46653
trees 316812

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 Query processing exercises
• Exercise: If the query is friends AND romans AND
(NOT countrymen), how could we use the freq of
countrymen?
• Exercise: Extend the merge to an arbitrary
Boolean query. Can we always guarantee
execution in time linear in the total postings size?
• Hint: Begin with the case of a Boolean formula
query: in this, each query term appears only once
in the query.
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Consider these documents:
Doc 1 breakthrough drug for schizophrenia
Doc 2 new schizophrenia drug
Doc 3 new approach for treatment of schizophrenia
Doc 4 new hopes for schizophrenia patients
a. Draw the term-document incidence matrix for this
document collection.
b. Draw the inverted index representation for this
collection
For the document collection above, what are the returned
results for
these queries:
a. schizophrenia AND drug
b. for AND NOT(drug OR approach)
 Exercise
• Try the search feature at
http://www.rhymezone.com/shakespeare/
• Write down five search features you think it
could do better

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Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Phrase queries and positional indexes
 Sec. 2.4

Phrase queries
• We want to be able to answer queries such as
“stanford university” – as a phrase
• Thus the sentence “I went to university at
Stanford” is not a match.
– The concept of phrase queries has proven easily
understood by users; one of the few “advanced
search” ideas that works
– Many more queries are implicit phrase queries
• For this, it no longer suffices to store only
<term : docs> entries
 Sec. 2.4.1

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
– friends romans
– romans countrymen
• Each of these biwords is now a dictionary term
• Two-word phrase query-processing is now
immediate.
 Sec. 2.4.1

Longer phrase queries

• Longer phrases can be processed by breaking
them down
• stanford university palo alto can be broken into
the Boolean query on biwords:
stanford university AND university palo AND palo
alto

Without the docs, we cannot verify that the docs

matching the above Boolean query do contain
the phrase.

Can have false positives!

 Sec. 2.4.1

Issues for biword indexes

• False positives, as noted before
• Index blowup due to bigger dictionary
– Infeasible for more than biwords, big even for
them

• Biword indexes are not the standard solution

(for all biwords) but can be part of a
compound strategy
 Sec. 2.4.2

Solution 2: Positional indexes

• In the postings, store, for each term the
position(s) in which tokens of it appear:

<term, number of docs containing term;

doc1: position1, position2 … ;
doc2: position1, position2 … ;
etc.>
 Sec. 2.4.2

Positional index example

<be: 993427;
1: 7, 18, 33, 72, 86, 231;
Which of docs 1,2,4,5
2: 3, 149; could contain “to be
4: 17, 191, 291, 430, 434; or not to be”?

5: 363, 367, …>

• For phrase queries, we use a merge

algorithm recursively at the document level
• But we now need to deal with more than
just equality
 Sec. 2.4.2

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
 Sec. 2.4.2

Proximity queries
• LIMIT! /3 STATUTE /3 FEDERAL /2 TORT
– Again, here, /k means “within k words of”.
• Clearly, positional indexes can be used for
such queries; biword indexes cannot.
• Exercise: Adapt the linear merge of postings to
handle proximity queries. Can you make it
work for any value of k?
– This is a little tricky to do correctly and efficiently
– See Figure 2.12 of IIR
 Sec. 2.4.2

Positional index size

• A positional index expands postings storage
substantially
– Even though indices can be compressed
• Nevertheless, a positional index 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.
 Sec. 2.4.2

Positional index size

• Need an entry for each occurrence, not just
once per document
• Index size depends on average document size Why?

– Average web page has <1000 terms

– SEC filings, books, even some epic poems … easily
100,000 terms
• Consider a
Document size
term with frequency 0.1%
Postings Positional postings
1000 1 1
100,000 1 100
 Sec. 2.4.2

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

– Caveat: all of this holds for “English-like”

languages
 Sec. 2.4.3

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”
• Williams et al. (2004) evaluate a more
sophisticated mixed indexing scheme
– A typical web query mixture was executed in ¼ of the
time of using just a positional index
– It required 26% more space than having a positional
index alone
An algorithm for proximity intersection of postings lists p1 and p2.
The algorithm finds places where the two terms appear within k words of each other
and returns a list of triples giving docID and the term position in p1 and p2.
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Structured vs. Unstructured Data
 IR vs. databases:
Structured vs unstructured data
• Structured data tends to refer to information
in “tables”
Employee Manager Salary
Smith Jones 50000
Chang Smith 60000
Ivy Smith 50000

Typically allows numerical range and exact match

(for text) queries, e.g.,
Salary < 60000 AND Manager = Smith.
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 Unstructured data
• Typically refers to free text
• Allows
– Keyword queries including operators
– More sophisticated “concept” queries e.g.,
• find all web pages dealing with drug abuse
• Classic model for searching text documents

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 Semi-structured data
• In fact almost no data is “unstructured”
• E.g., this slide has distinctly identified zones such
as the Title and Bullets
• … to say nothing of linguistic structure
• Facilitates “semi-structured” search such as
– Title contains data AND Bullets contain search
• Or even
– Title is about Object Oriented Programming AND
Author something like stro*rup
– where * is the wild-card operator

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