Wollo University

Kombolcha Institute of Technology

College of Informatics
Department of Information Technology

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Course Outline
 Course Title: Information Storage and Retrieval
 Course Code: ITec3081
 ECTS Credits (CP): 5
 Target Group: B.Sc. 3rd year Information
Technology Students (Regular Program)
 Year /Semester: Year: III, Semester: II
 Status of the Course: Core

Instructor: Habtamu Abate (M.Sc.)

Mobile: 0936428921
Email: habate999@gmail.com
Contact Hours (per week) Section A Section B
Lecture Mon 7:40-9:30 Wen 2:20-4:00
Lab/Practical Thurs. 2:20-5:00 Fri 2:20-5:00
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Course Outline
Course Description :
This course will cover introductory concepts of Information Storage
and Retrieval; automatic text operation including automatic indexing;
data and file structure for information retrieval; retrieval models;
evaluation of information retrieval systems and techniques for
enhancing retrieval effectiveness; query languages, query operations,
string manipulation and search algorithms; and Current Issues in IR
etc.
Course Objective
At the end of the course students will be able to:
 Understand the various Information Retrieval Systems and
processes
 Know the retrieval model and evaluation of Information Retrieval
Systems
 Understand the processes of information storage and retrieval
 Design ,develop and evaluate information retrieval models
 Understand evaluation issues in IR
 Understand current issues in IR 3
 Course Syllabus
 IR and IR systems
Chapter One  Data versus information retrieval
Introduction to ISR  IR and the retrieval process
 Basic structure of an IR system

 Index term selection (Luhn’s selection and

Chapter Two Zipf’s law in IR)
Text/Document Operations and  Document pre-processing (Lexical
Automatic Indexing analysis, Stop word Elimination, stemming)
 Term extraction (Term weighting and
similarity measures)

 Inverted files
Chapter Three  Tries, Suffix Trees and Suffix Arrays
Indexing Structures  Signature files

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Course Syllabus
 Introduction of IR Models
Chapter Four  Boolean model
IR Models  Vector space model
 Probabilistic model

Chapter Five  Evaluation of IR systems

Retrieval  Relevance judgment
Evaluation  Performance measures (Recall, Precision, etc.)

 Keyword-based queries
Chapter Six
 Pattern matching
Query Languages
 Structural queries

Chapter Seven  Relevance feedback

Query Operations  Query expansion

Chapter Eight  Research in IR (Multimedia Retrieval, Web

Current Issues in IR Retrieval, Question answering. etc.)
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Assessment

 Assignments=10% ,Test=10% / Lab Exam=10%, Project work= 20 % ;

Mid Exam=20% ; Final examination= 40%
Text Book
 Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information
Retrieval, ACM Press.,2008.
Other Reference Books:
 Salton, G. and McGill, M. J. Introduction to Modern Information
Retrieval, McGraw-Hill Co., 1983.
 Robert R. Korfhage, Information Storage and Retrieval, John Wiley and
Sons, 1997.
 Information Retrieval: Data Structures and Algorithms by W. B. Frakes
and R. Baeza-Yates (Eds.) (Prentice-Hall) 1992, ISBN 0-13-463837-9.
 Spärck Jones, K. and Willett, P. (eds.). Readings in information retrieval.
San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.

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Chapter 1: Introduction to Information Storage and retrieval
Outline

• IR and IR systems
• Data versus information retrieval
• IR and the retrieval process
• Basic structure of an IR

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 Information Retrieval
 Information retrieval (IR) is the process of
finding material (usually documents) of an
unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies
an information need from within large collections
(usually stored on computers).

 Information is organized into (a large number of)

documents
 Large collections of documents from various
sources: news articles, research papers, books,
digital libraries, Web pages, etc.
 Example: Web Search Engines like Google claim to
index over 1 Trillion pages
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Information Retrieval
 Document: Any object that can be
stored and can be retrieved
• Information Need: What kind of
information you need to find
– what you have in mind
• Query: Statement of an information
need or representation of an
information need.
• The user has an information need (IN)
in his/her mind.
• The Retrieval System can’t
understand the IN directly. Examples
• IN has to be abstracted into a form Good textbook for
that matches the information system Information retrieval
• This abstraction is a query

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General Goal of Information Retrieval

 To help users find useful information based

on their information needs (with a minimum
effort) despite
 Increasing complexity of Information
 Changing needs of user

 Provide immediate random access to the

document collection.

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Information Retrieval Systems?
• Document (Web page)
retrieval in response to a
query
– Quite effective (at some
things)
– Commercially successful
(some of them)
• But what goes on behind the
scenes?
– How do they work?
Web search systems
– What happens beyond the • Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, Google, Live,
Web? Northern Light, Teoma, HotBot, Baidu,
…

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Examples of IR systems
Conventional (library catalog): Search by keyword,
title, author, etc.
Text-based (Lexis-Nexis, Google, FAST):
Search by keywords. Limited search using queries in
natural language.
Multimedia (QBIC, WebSeek, SaFe): Search by
visual appearance (shapes, colors,… ).
Question answering systems (AskJeeves,
Answerbus): Search in (restricted) natural language
Other:
Cross language information retrieval,
Music retrieval
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 Information Retrieval vs. Data Retrieval
Emphasis of IR is on the retrieval of information, rather than
on the retrieval of data

Data retrieval
 Consists mainly of determining which documents contain a set of
keywords in the user query (which is not enough to satisfy the
user information need)
 Aims at retrieving all objects that satisfy well defined semantics
 a single erroneous object among a thousand retrieved objects
implies failure

Information retrieval
 Is concerned with retrieving information about a subject or topic
than retrieving data which satisfies a given query
 semantics is frequently loose: the retrieved objects might be
inaccurate
 small errors are tolerated
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 Information Retrieval vs. Data Retrieval
• Example of data retrieval system is a relational database

Data Retrieval Info Retrieval

Data organization Structured Unstructured
Fields Clear Semantics No fields (other
(ID, Name, age,…) than text)
Query Language Artificial (defined, Free text (“natural
SQL) language”), Boolean
Matching Exact (results are Partial match, best match
always “correct”)
Query specification Complete Incomplete
Items wanted Matching Relevant
Accuracy 100% < 50%
Error response Sensitive Insensitive
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Basic Concepts in Information
Retrieval:
(i) User Task and (ii) Logical View of documents

The User Task:

two user task – retrieval and browsing

Retrieval

DB
Browsing

USER
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 The User Task
Retrieval
 It is the process of retrieving information whereby the
main objective is clearly defined from the onset of
searching process.
 The user of a retrieval system has to translate his

information need into a query in the language provided

by the system.
 In this context (i.e. by specifying a set of words), the

user searches for useful information executing a

retrieval task
 English Language Statement :

 I want a book by Hadis Alemayehu titled Fikir Esk

Mekaber
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Browsing
It is the process of retrieving information, whereby
the main objective is not clearly defined from the
beginning and whose purpose might change during the
interaction with the system.
E.g. User might search for documents about ‘car
racing’. Meanwhile S/he might find interesting
documents about ‘car manufacturers’. While reading
about car manufacturers in Addis, S/he might turn
his/her attention to a document providing ‘direction
to Addis’, and from this to documents which cover
‘Tourism in Ethiopia’.
In this context, user is said to be browsing in the
collection and not searching, since a user may has an
interest glancing around
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 Logical View of Documents

Documents in a collection are frequently represented by a
set of index terms or keywords

Such keywords are mostly extracted directly from the
text of the document

These representative keywords provide a logical view of
the document

Docs Tokenizationstop words stemming Indexing

Full Index terms

text

Document representation viewed as a continuum, in which
logical view of documents might shift from full text to
index terms 18
Logical view of documents
• If full text :
– Each word in the text is a keyword
– Most complex form
– Expensive
 If full text is too large, the set of
representative keywords can be reduced through
transformation process called text operation
 It reduce the complexity of the document
representation and allow moving the logical view
from that of a full text to a set of index terms

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 Structure of an IR System
An Information Retrieval System serves as a bridge between
the world of authors and the world of readers/users,
That is, writers present a set of ideas in a document using a
set of concepts. Then Users seek the IR system for relevant
documents that satisfy their information need.
User Documents
Black box

The black box is the information retrieval system.

To be effective in its attempt to satisfy information need of users,
the IR system must ‘interpret’ the contents of documents in a
collection and rank them according to their degree of relevance to
the user query.
Thus the notion of relevance is at the centre of IR
The primary goal of an IR system is to retrieve all the documents
which are relevant to a user query while retrieving as few non-
relevant documents as possible
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Typical IR Task

Given:
 A corpus of textual natural-language
documents.
 A user query in the form of a textual
string.
Find:
 A ranked set of documents that are
relevant to the query.

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Typical IR System Architecture

Document
corpus

Query IR
String System

1. Doc1
2. Doc2
Ranked 3. Doc3
Documents .
.

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Web Search System

Web Spider
Document
corpus

Query IR
String System

1. Page1
2. Page2
3. Page3 Ranked
. Documents
.

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What is Information Retrieval ?
• A good formal definition of information retrieval is
given in Baeze-Yates & Riberio-Neto (1990, p1)

“Information retrieval deals with representation,

storage, organization of, and access to information
items. The organization and access of information items
should provide the user with easy access to the
information in which S/he is interested”

• The definition incorporates all important features of a

good information retrieval system
– Representation
– Storage
– Organization
– Access
• The focus is on the user information need
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Overview of the Retrieval process

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The Retrieval Process
• It is necessary to define the text database
before any of the retrieval processes are initiated

• This is usually done by the manager of the

database and includes specifying the following
– The documents to be used
– The operations to be performed on the text
– The text model to be used (the text structure
and what elements can be retrieved)

• The text operations transform the original

documents and the information needs and generate
a logical view of them
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The Retrieval Process …
• Once the logical view of the documents is defined, the
database module builds an index of the text
– An index is a critical data structure
– It allows fast searching over large volumes of data
• Different index structures might be used , but the most
popular one is the inverted file.
• Given that the document database is indexed, the
retrieval process can be initiated
The user first specifies a user need which is then parsed
and transformed by the same text operation applied to the
text
Next the query operations is applied before the actual
query, which provides a system representation for the
user need, is generated
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 The Retrieval Process …
• The query is then processed to obtain the retrieved documents
Before the retrieved documents are sent to the user, the retrieved
documents are ranked according to the likelihood of relevance
The user then examines the set of ranked documents in the
search for useful information. Two choices for the user:
(i) reformulate query, run on entire collection or
(ii) reformulate query, run on result set
At this point, s/he might pinpoint a subset of the documents
seen as definitely of interest and initiate a user feedback cycle
In such a cycle, the system uses the documents selected by
the user to change the query formulation.
Hopefully, this modified query is a better representation of
the real user need

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 Detail view of the Retrieval
Process User Text
Interface
User Text
need

Text Operations
logical view Logical view
DB
User Query Language manager
Indexing Module
feedback & Operations

Query Inverted file

Searching Index

Retrieved docs Text

Database
Ranked docs
Ranking
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 Subsystems of an IR system

• The two subsystems of an IR system:

–Searching: is an online process of finding relevant
documents in the index list as per users query
–Indexing: is an offline process of organizing documents
using keywords extracted from the collection
• Indexing and searching: are unavoidably connected
–you cannot search what was not first indexed in
some manner or other
–indexing of documents or objects is done in order to
be searchable
– there are many ways to do indexing
–to index one needs an indexing language
– there are many indexing languages
– even taking every word in a document is an indexing language
• Knowing searching is knowing indexing
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Indexing Subsystem

documents
Documents Assign document identifier

text document
Tokenize
IDs
tokens
Stop list
non-stoplist Stemming & Normalize
tokens
stemmed Term weighting
terms
terms with
weights Index

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Searching Subsystem
query parse query
query tokens
ranked
Stop list non-stoplist
document
tokens
set
ranking
Stemming & Normalize
relevant stemmed terms
document set
Similarity Query Term weighting
Measure terms
Index terms
Index

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 Issues that arise in IR
 Text representation
 what makes a “good” representation?
 how is a representation generated from text?
 what are retrievable objects and how are they
organized?
 information needs representation
 what is an appropriate query language?
 how can interactive query formulation and refinement
be supported?
 Comparing representations (to identify relevant
documents)
 What weighting scheme and similarity measure to be
used?
 what is a “good” model of retrieval?
 Evaluating effectiveness of retrieval
 what are good metrics?
 what constitutes a good experimental test bed? 33
 Focus in IR System Design
Our focus during IR system design is:
• In improving performance effectiveness of the system
–Effectiveness of the system is measured in terms of
precision, recall, …
–Stemming, stop words, weighting schemes, matching
algorithms
• In improving performance efficiency
–The concern here is storage space usage, access time,
searching time, data transfer time …
–Concern regarding space – time tradeoffs !!
–Use Compression techniques, data/file structures, etc.

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Thank you

Questions?

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