IR Models

Abdo A.
2019/20

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 Outline

 IR Models - Basic Concepts

 Mapping Documents & Queries

 Boolean model

 Vector space model

March 9, 2020 2
 IR Models - Basic Concepts
 Word evidence: Bag of words
 IR systems usually adopt index terms to index and retrieve
documents
 Each document is represented by a set of representative
keywords or index terms (called Bag of Words)
 An index term is a word from a document useful for
remembering the document main themes
 Not all terms are equally useful for representing the document
contents:
 less frequent terms allow identifying a narrower set of
documents.
 But No ordering information is attached to the Bag of Words
identified from the document collection. 3
 IR Models - Basic Concepts
• One central problem regarding IR systems is the issue of predicting
which documents are relevant and which are not.
• Such a decision is usually dependent on a ranking algorithm
which attempts to establish a simple ordering of the
documents retrieved.
• Documents appearning at the top of this ordering are
considered to be more likely to be relevant.
• Thus ranking algorithms are at the core of IR systems
• The IR models determine the predictions of what is relevant
and what is not, based on the notion of relevance implemented by
the system
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 IR Models - Basic Concepts
• After preprocessing, N distinct terms remain which are
Unique terms that form the VOCABULARY
• Let
– ki be an index term i & dj be a document j
– K = (k1, k2, …, kN) is the set of all index terms
• Each term, i, in a document or query j, is given a real-valued
weight, wij.
– wij is a weight associated with (ki,dj). If wij = 0 , it indicates
that term does not belong to document dj
• The weight wij quantifies the importance of the index term
for describing the document contents
• vec(dj) = (w1j, w2j, …, wtj) is a weighted vector associated
with the document dj 5
Mapping Documents & Queries
Represent both documents and queries as N-dimensional
vectors in a term-document matrix, which shows
occurrence of terms in the document collection or query
 An entry in the matrix
 corresponds to the “weight” of a term in
the document; d j  (t1, j , t 2, j ,..., t N , j ); qk  (t1,k , t 2,k ,..., t N ,k )

T1 T2 …. TN – Document collection is mapped to

term-by-document matrix
D1 w11 w12 … w1N
D2 w21 w22 … w2N – The documents are viewed as
vectors in multidimensional space
: : : :
: : : : • “Nearby” vectors are related
DM wM1 wM2 … wMN – Normalize the weight as usual for
vector length to avoid the effect of
document length
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 Weighting Terms in Vector Sapce
 The importance of the index terms is represented by
weights associated to them
 Problem: to show the importance of the index term for
describing the document/query contents, what weight can
we assign?
 Solution 1: Binary weights: t=1 if presence, 0 otherwise
 Similarity: number of terms in common
 Problem: Not all terms equally interesting
 E.g. the vs. dog vs. cat
 Solution: Replace binary weights with non-binary
weights 

d j  ( w1, j , w2, j ,..., wN , j ); qk  ( w1,k , w2,k ,..., wN ,k )
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 1. The Boolean Model
• Boolean model is a simple model based on set theory
 The Boolean model imposes a binary criterion for
deciding relevance
• Terms are either present or absent. Thus,
wij  {0,1}
• sim(q,dj) = 1, if document satisfies the boolean query
0 otherwise
T1 T2 …. TN
D1 w11 w12 … w1N
- Note that, no weights D2 w21 w22 … w2N
assigned in-between 0 and 1, : : : :
only values 0 or 1 can be : : : :
assigned
DM wM1 wM2 … wMN
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 The Boolean Model: Example
• Generate the relevant documents retrieved by the
Boolean model for the query :
q = k1  (k2  k3)
k2
k1
d7
d2 d6

d4 d5
d3
d1

k3

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 The Boolean Model: Example
 Given the following determine documents retrieved by the
Boolean model based IR system
 Index Terms: K1, …,K8.
 Documents:
1. D1 = {K1, K2, K3, K4, K5}
2. D2 = {K1, K2, K3, K4}
3. D3 = {K2, K4, K6, K8}
4. D4 = {K1, K3, K5, K7}
5. D5 = {K4, K5, K6, K7, K8}
6. D6 = {K1, K2, K3, K4}
• Query: K1 (K2  K3)
• Answer: {D1, D2, D4, D6} ({D1, D2, D3, D6} {D3, D5})
= {D1, D2, D6}
 The Boolean Model: Further Example
Given the following three documents, Construct Term –
document matrix and find the relevant documents retrieved by
the Boolean model for given query Also find the relevant
• D1: “Shipment of gold damaged in a fire” documents for the
• D2: “Delivery of silver arrived in a silver truck” queries:
• D3: “Shipment of gold arrived in a truck” (a) “gold delivery”;
• Query: “gold silver truck” (b) ship gold;
(c) “silver truck”
Table below shows document –term (ti) matrix
arrive damage deliver fire gold silver ship truck
D1
D2
D3

Query
 Exercise
Given the following three documents with the following
contents:
 D1 = “computer information retrieval”

 D2 = “computer retrieval”

 D3 = “information”

 D4 = “computer information”

 What are the relevant documents retrieved for the

queries:
 Q1 = “information  retrieval”

 Q2 = “information  ¬computer”

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 Exercise:
What are the relevant documents retrieved for the query:
((information OR technology) AND (science OR computer))
Doc No Term 1 Term 2 Term 3 Term 4
1 science
2 computer
3 computer science
4 technology
5 technology science
6 technology computer
7 technology computer science
8 information
9 information science
10 information computer
11 information computer science
12 information technology
13 information technology science
14 information technology computer
15 information technology computer science
 Drawbacks of the Boolean Model
• Retrieval based on binary decision criteria with no notion
of partial matching
• No ranking of the documents is provided (absence of a
grading scale)
• Information need has to be translated into a Boolean
expression which most users find awkward
• The Boolean queries formulated by the users are most
often too simplistic
• As a consequence, the Boolean model frequently returns
either too few or too many documents in response to a
user query
• Just changing a boolean operator from “AND” to “OR”
changes the result from intersection to union
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 2. Vector-Space Model (VSM)
 This is the most commonly used strategy for measuring
relevance of documents for a given query. This is
because,
• Use of binary weights is too limiting
• Non-binary weights provide consideration for partial
matches
 These term weights are used to compute a degree of
similarity between a query and each document
• Ranked set of documents provides for better matching
 The idea behind VSM is that
• the meaning of a document is conveyed by the words
used in that document
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 Vector-Space Model
To find relevant documens for a given query,
 First, Documents and queries are mapped into term vector space.
• Note that queries are considered as short documents
 Second, in the vector space, queries and documents are
represented as weighted vectors
• There are different weighting technique; the most widely used
one is computing tf*idf for each term
 Third, similarity measurement is used to rank documents by the
closeness of their vectors to the query.
• Documents are ranked by closeness to the query.
• Closeness is determined by a similarity score calculation
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 Term-document matrix.
 A collection of n documents and query can be represented
in the vector space model by a term-document matrix.
 An entry in the matrix corresponds to the “weight” of a
term in the document;
 zero means the term has no significance in the

document or it simply doesn’t exist in the document.

Otherwise, wij > 0 whenever ki  dj
T1 T2 …. TN
D1 w11 w21 … w1N
D2 w21 w22 … w2N
: : : :
: : : :
DM wM1 wM2 … wMN 17
 Computing weights
• How do we compute weights for term i in document j
and query q; wij and wiq ?
• A good weight must take into account two effects:
–Quantification of intra-document contents (similarity)
• The tf factor, the term frequency within a
document
–Quantification of inter-documents separation
(dissimilarity)
• The idf factor, the inverse document frequency
–As a result of which most IR systems are using tf*idf
weighting technique:
wij = tf(i,j) * idf(i)
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 Computing Weights
• Let,
• N be the total number of documents in the collection
• ni be the number of documents which contain ki
• freq(i,j) raw frequency of ki within dj
• A normalized tf factor is given by
• f(i,j) = freq(i,j) / max(freq(l,j))
• where the maximum is computed over all terms
which occur within the document dj
• The idf factor is computed as
• idf(i) = log (N/ni)
• the log is used to make the values of tf and idf
comparable. It can also be interpreted as the amount
of information associated with the term ki. 19
 Computing weights
• The best term-weighting schemes use tf*idf weights which are
given by
 wij = f(i,j) * log(N/ni)

• For the query term weights, a suggestion is

wiq = (0.5 + [0.5 * freq(i,q) / max(freq(l,q)]) * log(N/ni)
• The vector space model with tf*idf weights is a good ranking
strategy with general collections
• The vector space model is usually as good as the known
ranking alternatives. It is also simple and fast to compute.

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 Example: Computing weights
• A collection includes 10,000 documents
• The term A appears 20 times in a particular document
• The maximum appearance of any term in this
document is 50
• The term A appears in 2,000 of the collection
documents.

• Compute TF*IDF weight?

• f(i,j) = freq(i,j) / max(freq(l,j)) = 20/50 = 0.4
• idf(i) = log(N/ni) = log (10,000/2,000) = log(5) = 2.32
• wij = f(i,j) * log(N/ni) = 0.4 * 2.32 = 0.928

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 Similarity Measure
j
dj


• Sim(q,dj) = cos() q
 

n i
d j q wi , j qi ,k
sim(d j , q)     i 1

 
n n
dj q w 2 2
q
i 1 i, j i 1 i ,k

• Since wij > 0 and wiq > 0, 0 <= sim(q,dj) <=1

• A document is retrieved even if it matches the query terms
only partially

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 Vector-Space Model: Example
• Suppose we query for the query: Q: “gold silver
truck”. The database collection consists of three
documents with the following documents.
• D1: “Shipment of gold damaged in a fire”
• D2: “Delivery of silver arrived in a silver truck”
• D3: “Shipment of gold arrived in a truck”
• Assume that all terms are used, including
common terms, stop words, and also no terms
are reduced to root terms.
• Show retrieval results in ranked order?
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 Vector-Space Model: Example
Terms Q Counts TF DF IDF Wi = TF*IDF

D1 D2 D3 Q D1 D2 D3
a 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 0 0
arrived 0 0 1 1 2 0.176 0 0 0.176 0.176
damaged 0 1 0 0 1 0.477 0 0.477 0 0
delivery 0 0 1 0 1 0.477 0 0 0.477 0
fire 0 1 0 0 1 0.477 0 0.477 0 0
gold 1 1 0 1 2 0.176 0.176 0.176 0 0.176
in 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 0 0
of 0 1 1 1 3 0 0 0 0 0
silver 1 0 2 0 1 0.477 0.477 0 0.954 0
shipment 0 1 0 1 2 0.176 0 0.176 0 0.176
truck 1 0 1 1 2 0.176 0.176 0 0.176 0.176
 Vector-Space Model TF*IDF
Terms Q D1 D2 D3
a 0 0 0 0
arrived 0 0 0.176 0.176
damaged 0 0.477 0 0
delivery 0 0 0.477 0
fire 0 0.477 0 0
gold 0.176 0.176 0 0.176
in 0 0 0 0
of 0 0 0 0
silver 0.477 0 0.954 0
shipment 0 0.176 0 0.176
truck 0.176 0 0.176 0.176
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 Vector-Space Model: Example
• Compute similarity using cosine Sim(q,d1)
• First, for each document and query, compute all vector
lengths (zero terms ignored)
|d1|= 0 .477 2
 0 .477 2
 0 .176 2
 0 .176 2
= 0.517 = 0.719
|d2|= 0 .176 2
 0.477 2
 0.176 2
 0.176 2
= 1.2001 = 1.095
|d3|= 0.176  0.176  0.176  0.176 = 0.124 = 0.352
2 2 2 2

|q|= 0.1762
 0.4712
 0.1762
= 0.2896 = 0.538
• Next, compute dot products (zero products ignored)
Q*d1= 0.176*0.167 = 0.0310
Q*d2 = 0.954*0.477 + 0.176 *0.176 = 0.4862
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Q*d3 = 0.176*0.167 + 0.176*0.167 = 0.0620
 Vector-Space Model: Example
Now, compute similarity score
Sim(q,d1) = (0.0310) / (0.538*0.719) = 0.0801
Sim(q,d2) = (0.4862 ) / (0.538*1.095)= 0.8246
Sim(q,d3) = (0.0620) / (0.538*0.352)= 0.3271
Finally, we sort and rank documents in
descending order according to the similarity
scores
Rank 1: Doc 2 = 0.8246
Rank 2: Doc 3 = 0.3271
Rank 3: Doc 1 = 0.0801
• Exercise: using normalized TF, rank documents using
cosine similarity measure? Hint: Normalize TF of term i
in doc j using max frequency of a term k in document j.
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 Vector-Space Model
• Advantages:
• term-weighting improves quality of the answer set
since it displays in ranked order
• partial matching allows retrieval of documents that
approximate the query conditions
• cosine ranking formula sorts documents according to
degree of similarity to the query
• Disadvantages:
• assumes independence of index terms (??)

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 Technical Memo Example
Suppose the database collection consists of the following documents.

c1: Human machine interface for Lab ABC computer applications

c2: A survey of user opinion of computer system response time
c3: The EPS user interface management system
c4: System and human system engineering testing of EPS
c5: Relation of user-perceived response time to error measure
M1: The generation of random, binary, unordered trees
M2: The intersection graph of paths in trees
M3: Graph minors: Widths of trees and well-quasi-ordering
m4: Graph minors: A survey
Query: Find documents relevant to “human computer interaction tree”
 Exercises
 Given the following documents, rank documents
according to their relevance to the query using
cosine similarity, Euclidean distance and inner
product measures?
docID words in document
1 Information Retrieval
2 Modern Retrieval System
3 Computer Science
4 Data Retrieval Science
Query: Retreival Science ?

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Thank you
 Exercises

 Given the following documents, rank documents according

to their relevance to the query using cosine similarity,
Euclidean distance and inner product measures?
docID words in document
1 Information Retrieval
2 Modern Retrieval System
3 Computer Science
4 Data Retrieval Science
Query: Retreival Science ?
Information Retrieval Modern System Computer Science Data
1
2
3
4
Query 32