Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
CS276: Information Retrieval and Web Search
Pandu Nayak and Prabhakar Raghavan
Lecture 3: Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Recap of the previous lecture
The type/token distinction
Terms are normalized types put in the dictionary
Tokenization problems:
Hyphens, apostrophes, compounds, CJK
Term equivalence classing:
Numbers, case folding, stemming, lemmatization
Skip pointers
Encoding a tree-like structure in a postings list
Biword indexes for phrases
Positional indexes for phrases/proximity queries
Ch. 2
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
This lecture
Dictionary data structures
Tolerant retrieval
Wild-card queries
Spelling correction
Soundex
Ch. 3
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Dictionary data structures for inverted
indexes
The dictionary data structure stores the term
vocabulary, document frequency, pointers to each
postings list in what data structure?

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Introduction to Information Retrieval
A nave dictionary
An array of struct:






char[20] int Postings *
20 bytes 4/8 bytes 4/8 bytes
How do we store a dictionary in memory efficiently?
How do we quickly look up elements at query time?
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Dictionary data structures
Two main choices:
Hashtables
Trees
Some IR systems use hashtables, some trees

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Hashtables
Each vocabulary term is hashed to an integer
(We assume youve seen hashtables before)
Pros:
Lookup is faster than for a tree: O(1)
Cons:
No easy way to find minor variants:
judgment/judgement
No prefix search [tolerant retrieval]
If vocabulary keeps growing, need to occasionally do the
expensive operation of rehashing everything
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Root
a-m n-z
a-hu hy-m n-sh si-z
Tree: binary tree
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Tree: B-tree
Definition: Every internal nodel has a number of children
in the interval [a,b] where a, b are appropriate natural
numbers, e.g., [2,4].
a-hu
hy-m
n-z
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Trees
Simplest: binary tree
More usual: B-trees
Trees require a standard ordering of characters and hence
strings but we typically have one
Pros:
Solves the prefix problem (terms starting with hyp)
Cons:
Slower: O(log M) [and this requires balanced tree]
Rebalancing binary trees is expensive
But B-trees mitigate the rebalancing problem
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
WILD-CARD QUERIES
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Wild-card queries: *
mon*: find all docs containing any word beginning
with mon.
Easy with binary tree (or B-tree) lexicon: retrieve all
words in range: mon w < moo
*mon: find words ending in mon: harder
Maintain an additional B-tree for terms backwards.
Can retrieve all words in range: nom w < non.
Exercise: from this, how can we enumerate all terms
meeting the wild-card query pro*cent ?
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Introduction to Information Retrieval
Query processing
At this point, we have an enumeration of all terms in
the dictionary that match the wild-card query.
We still have to look up the postings for each
enumerated term.
E.g., consider the query:
se*ate AND fil*er
This may result in the execution of many Boolean
AND queries.
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B-trees handle *s at the end of a
query term
How can we handle *s in the middle of query term?
co*tion
We could look up co* AND *tion in a B-tree and
intersect the two term sets
Expensive
The solution: transform wild-card queries so that the
*s occur at the end
This gives rise to the Permuterm Index.
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Permuterm index
For term hello, index under:
hello$, ello$h, llo$he, lo$hel, o$hell
where $ is a special symbol.
Queries:
X lookup on X$ X* lookup on $X*
*X lookup on X$* *X* lookup on X*
X*Y lookup on Y$X* X*Y*Z ??? Exercise!
Query = hel*o
X=hel, Y=o
Lookup o$hel*
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Permuterm query processing
Rotate query wild-card to the right
Now use B-tree lookup as before.
Permuterm problem: quadruples lexicon size
Empirical observation for English.
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Bigram (k-gram) indexes
Enumerate all k-grams (sequence of k chars)
occurring in any term
e.g., from text April is the cruelest month we get
the 2-grams (bigrams)



$ is a special word boundary symbol
Maintain a second inverted index from bigrams to
dictionary terms that match each bigram.
$a,ap,pr,ri,il,l$,$i,is,s$,$t,th,he,e$,$c,cr,ru,
ue,el,le,es,st,t$, $m,mo,on,nt,h$
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Bigram index example
The k-gram index finds terms based on a query
consisting of k-grams (here k=2).
mo
on
among
$m mace
along
amortize
madden
among
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Processing wild-cards
Query mon* can now be run as
$m AND mo AND on
Gets terms that match AND version of our wildcard
query.
But wed enumerate moon.
Must post-filter these terms against query.
Surviving enumerated terms are then looked up in
the term-document inverted index.
Fast, space efficient (compared to permuterm).
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Processing wild-card queries
As before, we must execute a Boolean query for each
enumerated, filtered term.
Wild-cards can result in expensive query execution
(very large disjunctions)
pyth* AND prog*
If you encourage laziness people will respond!




Which web search engines allow wildcard queries?
Search
Type your search terms, use * if you need to.
E.g., Alex* will match Alexander.




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Introduction to Information Retrieval
SPELLING CORRECTION
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Spell correction
Two principal uses
Correcting document(s) being indexed
Correcting user queries to retrieve right answers
Two main flavors:
Isolated word
Check each word on its own for misspelling
Will not catch typos resulting in correctly spelled words
e.g., from form
Context-sensitive
Look at surrounding words,
e.g., I flew form Heathrow to Narita.
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Document correction
Especially needed for OCRed documents
Correction algorithms are tuned for this: rn/m
Can use domain-specific knowledge
E.g., OCR can confuse O and D more often than it would confuse O
and I (adjacent on the QWERTY keyboard, so more likely
interchanged in typing).
But also: web pages and even printed material have
typos
Goal: the dictionary contains fewer misspellings
But often we dont change the documents and
instead fix the query-document mapping
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Query mis-spellings
Our principal focus here
E.g., the query Alanis Morisett
We can either
Retrieve documents indexed by the correct spelling, OR
Return several suggested alternative queries with the
correct spelling
Did you mean ?
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Isolated word correction
Fundamental premise there is a lexicon from which
the correct spellings come
Two basic choices for this
A standard lexicon such as
Websters English Dictionary
An industry-specific lexicon hand-maintained
The lexicon of the indexed corpus
E.g., all words on the web
All names, acronyms etc.
(Including the mis-spellings)
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Isolated word correction
Given a lexicon and a character sequence Q, return
the words in the lexicon closest to Q
Whats closest?
Well study several alternatives
Edit distance (Levenshtein distance)
Weighted edit distance
n-gram overlap
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Edit distance
Given two strings S
1
and S
2
, the minimum number of
operations to convert one to the other
Operations are typically character-level
Insert, Delete, Replace, (Transposition)
E.g., the edit distance from dof to dog is 1
From cat to act is 2 (Just 1 with transpose.)
from cat to dog is 3.
Generally found by dynamic programming.
See http://www.merriampark.com/ld.htm for a nice
example plus an applet.
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Weighted edit distance
As above, but the weight of an operation depends on
the character(s) involved
Meant to capture OCR or keyboard errors
Example: m more likely to be mis-typed as n than as q
Therefore, replacing m by n is a smaller edit distance than
by q
This may be formulated as a probability model
Requires weight matrix as input
Modify dynamic programming to handle weights
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Using edit distances
Given query, first enumerate all character sequences
within a preset (weighted) edit distance (e.g., 2)
Intersect this set with list of correct words
Show terms you found to user as suggestions
Alternatively,
We can look up all possible corrections in our inverted
index and return all docs slow
We can run with a single most likely correction
The alternatives disempower the user, but save a
round of interaction with the user
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Edit distance to all dictionary terms?
Given a (mis-spelled) query do we compute its edit
distance to every dictionary term?
Expensive and slow
Alternative?
How do we cut the set of candidate dictionary
terms?
One possibility is to use n-gram overlap for this
This can also be used by itself for spelling correction.
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n-gram overlap
Enumerate all the n-grams in the query string as well
as in the lexicon
Use the n-gram index (recall wild-card search) to
retrieve all lexicon terms matching any of the query
n-grams
Threshold by number of matching n-grams
Variants weight by keyboard layout, etc.
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Example with trigrams
Suppose the text is november
Trigrams are nov, ove, vem, emb, mbe, ber.
The query is december
Trigrams are dec, ece, cem, emb, mbe, ber.
So 3 trigrams overlap (of 6 in each term)
How can we turn this into a normalized measure of
overlap?
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One option Jaccard coefficient
A commonly-used measure of overlap
Let X and Y be two sets; then the J.C. is


Equals 1 when X and Y have the same elements and
zero when they are disjoint
X and Y dont have to be of the same size
Always assigns a number between 0 and 1
Now threshold to decide if you have a match
E.g., if J.C. > 0.8, declare a match
Y X Y X /
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lore
lore
Matching trigrams
Consider the query lord we wish to identify words
matching 2 of its 3 bigrams (lo, or, rd)
lo
or
rd
alone sloth
morbid
border card
border
ardent
Standard postings merge will enumerate
Adapt this to using Jaccard (or another) measure.
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Context-sensitive spell correction
Text: I flew from Heathrow to Narita.
Consider the phrase query flew form Heathrow
Wed like to respond
Did you mean flew from Heathrow?
because no docs matched the query phrase.
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Context-sensitive correction
Need surrounding context to catch this.
First idea: retrieve dictionary terms close (in
weighted edit distance) to each query term
Now try all possible resulting phrases with one word
fixed at a time
flew from heathrow
fled form heathrow
flea form heathrow
Hit-based spelling correction: Suggest the
alternative that has lots of hits.

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Exercise
Suppose that for flew form Heathrow we have 7
alternatives for flew, 19 for form and 3 for heathrow.
How many corrected phrases will we enumerate in
this scheme?
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Another approach
Break phrase query into a conjunction of biwords
(Lecture 2).
Look for biwords that need only one term corrected.
Enumerate only phrases containing common
biwords.
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General issues in spell correction
We enumerate multiple alternatives for Did you
mean?
Need to figure out which to present to the user
The alternative hitting most docs
Query log analysis
More generally, rank alternatives probabilistically
argmax
corr
P(corr | query)
From Bayes rule, this is equivalent to
argmax
corr
P(query | corr) * P(corr)

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Noisy channel Language model
Introduction to Information Retrieval
SOUNDEX
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Soundex
Class of heuristics to expand a query into phonetic
equivalents
Language specific mainly for names
E.g., chebyshev tchebycheff
Invented for the U.S. census in 1918
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Soundex typical algorithm
Turn every token to be indexed into a 4-character
reduced form
Do the same with query terms
Build and search an index on the reduced forms
(when the query calls for a soundex match)

http://www.creativyst.com/Doc/Articles/SoundEx1/SoundEx1.htm#Top
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Soundex typical algorithm
1. Retain the first letter of the word.
2. Change all occurrences of the following letters to '0'
(zero):
'A', E', 'I', 'O', 'U', 'H', 'W', 'Y'.
3. Change letters to digits as follows:
B, F, P, V 1
C, G, J, K, Q, S, X, Z 2
D,T 3
L 4
M, N 5
R 6
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Soundex continued
4. Remove all pairs of consecutive digits.
5. Remove all zeros from the resulting string.
6. Pad the resulting string with trailing zeros and
return the first four positions, which will be of the
form <uppercase letter> <digit> <digit> <digit>.

E.g., Herman becomes H655.

Will hermann generate the same code?
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Soundex
Soundex is the classic algorithm, provided by most
databases (Oracle, Microsoft, )
How useful is soundex?
Not very for information retrieval
Okay for high recall tasks (e.g., Interpol), though
biased to names of certain nationalities
Zobel and Dart (1996) show that other algorithms for
phonetic matching perform much better in the
context of IR
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What queries can we process?
We have
Positional inverted index with skip pointers
Wild-card index
Spell-correction
Soundex
Queries such as
(SPELL(moriset) /3 toron*to) OR SOUNDEX(chaikofski)
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Exercise
Draw yourself a diagram showing the various indexes
in a search engine incorporating all the functionality
we have talked about
Identify some of the key design choices in the index
pipeline:
Does stemming happen before the Soundex index?
What about n-grams?
Given a query, how would you parse and dispatch
sub-queries to the various indexes?
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Resources
IIR 3, MG 4.2
Efficient spell retrieval:
K. Kukich. Techniques for automatically correcting words in text. ACM
Computing Surveys 24(4), Dec 1992.
J. Zobel and P. Dart. Finding approximate matches in large
lexicons. Software - practice and experience 25(3), March 1995.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/zobel95finding.html
Mikael Tillenius: Efficient Generation and Ranking of Spelling Error
Corrections. Masters thesis at Swedens Royal Institute of Technology.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/179155.html
Nice, easy reading on spell correction:
Peter Norvig: How to write a spelling corrector
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
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