Information Retrieval

Lecture 2: Dictionary and

Postings
Recall basic indexing pipeline
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
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 …

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 email with a German pdf attachment.
● What is a unit document?
• A file?
Tokenization
Tokenization
● Input: “Books, Chapters and Lecture”
● Output: Tokens
• Books
• Chapters
• Lecture
Each such token is now a candidate for an index
entry, after further processing

But what are valid tokens to emit?

 Tokenization
● 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?
 Numbers

● 18/1/07 Jan. 18, 2007

● 1400 B.C.
● B-52
● authentication key is 324a3df234cb23e
● [Link]
• 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.
Tokenization: Language issues
● L'ensemble → one token or two?
• L ? L’ ? Le ?
• Want l’ensemble to match with un ensemble
 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
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
● ‫ ﻋﺎﻣﺎ ﻣن اﻻﺣﺗﻼل‬132 ‫ ﺑﻌد‬1962 ‫اﺳﺗﻘﻠت اﻟﺟزاﺋر ﻓﻲ ﺳﻧﺔ‬
.‫اﻟﻔرﻧﺳﻲ‬
● ‘Algeria achieved its independence in 1962
after 132 years of French occupation.’
 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
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
Normalization: other languages
● Need to “normalize” indexed text as well
as query terms into the same form
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…
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”
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
Soundex
● Traditional class of heuristics to expand a
query into phonetic equivalents
• Language specific – mainly for names
• E.g., chebyshev → tchebycheff
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
 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 example compressed for exampl compress and

and compression are both compress ar both accept
accepted as equivalent to as equival to compress
compress.
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.
 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
Porter Stemmer
● Consists of condition / action rules
● Condition may be on
- stems
- suffix
- rules
Conditions
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)
● 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)
● 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
Stemmers are not perfect:
Organization ! organ
University ! universe
Policy ! police
 Other stemmers
● Other stemmers exist, e.g., Lovins stemmer http://
[Link]/computing/research/stemming/general/[Link]
• 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
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
Faster postings merges:
Skip pointers
 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
2 8
1 2 3 5 8 17 21 31 Caesar

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.
Augment postings with skip pointers
(at indexing time)
16 128
2 4 8 16 32 64 128

18 2 3 5 8 3117 21 31

● Why?
● To skip postings that will not figure in the
search results.
● How?
● Where do we place skip pointers?
 Query processing with skip pointers
16 128
2 4 8 16 32 64 128

18 2 3 5 8 3117 21 31

Suppose we’ve stepped through the lists until we process 8

on each list.
When we get to 16 on the top list, we see that its
successor is 32.
But the skip successor of 8 on the lower list is 31, so
we can skip ahead past the intervening postings.
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.
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
Phrase queries
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
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.
● 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.
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!
 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
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)

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}
Soundex
1. Keep the first letter Letters Code
constant
2. Code the rests letter
aehiouwy 0
into digits as shown in bfpv 1
table
3. Ignore letters with same
cgjkqsxz 2
Soundex digit dt 3
4. Eliminate all zeros
l 4
5. Truncate or pad with
zeros to one initial letter mn 5
and three digits
r 6
Soundex Phonetic code
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)
Solution 2: Positional indexes
● Store, for each term, entries of the form:
<number of docs containing term;
doc1: position1, position2 … ;
doc2: position1, position2 … ;
etc.>
Positional index example
<be: 50647;
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, …>
● Can compress position values/offsets
● Nevertheless, this expands postings
storage substantially
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
Proximity queries
● Clearly, positional indexes can be used
for such queries; biword indexes
cannot.
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.
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%

Document size Postings Positional postings

1000 1 1
100,000 1 100
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
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”