Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
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
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Introduction to Information Retrieval

This lecture
▪ Dictionary data structures
▪ “Tolerant” retrieval
▪ Wild-card queries
▪ Spelling correction
▪ Soundex

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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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A naive 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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Dictionary data structures

▪ The choice of solution (hashing, or search trees) is
governed by :
▪ How many keys are we likely to have?

▪ Is the number likely to remain static, or change a lot – and

in the case of changes, are we likely to only have new keys
inserted, or to also have some keys in the dictionary be
deleted?

▪ What are the relative frequencies with which various keys

will be accessed?

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Hashtables
▪ Each vocabulary term is hashed to an integer
▪ 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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Tree: binary Search tree R

o
a- o n-
m t z

a-h hv- n-s si-

u m h z

ot
kle
s
ark

gen

zyg
sic
v

huy
ard

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Issue with BST

▪ The principal issue here is that of rebalancing: as terms are
inserted into or deleted from the binary search tree, it needs
to be rebalanced so that the balance property is maintained.

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Tree: B-tree

a-h n-
u hy- z
m

▪ Definition: Every internal node has a number of children

in the interval [a,b] where a, b are appropriate natural
numbers, e.g., [2,4].
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Trees
▪ Simplest: binary Search 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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WILD-CARD QUERIES

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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.i.e
root –to-leaf path of the B-tree corresponds to a term in
the dictionary written backwards eg. Lemon would be
represented as root-n-o-m-e-l.
Can retrieve all words in range: nom ≤ w < oom.
Exercise: from this, how can we enumerate all terms
meeting the wild-card query pro*cent ? 14
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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
▪ A special index for general wildcard queries is the permuterm index.

▪ First, we introduce a special symbol $ into our character set, to mark the
end of a term. E.g. Hello => Hello $

▪ Next, we construct a permuterm index, in which the various rotations of

each term (augmented with $) are linked to the original vocabulary term.

Permuterm
vocabulary

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Permuterm index
▪ Consider the wild card query m*n

▪ The key is to rotate such a wildcard query so that the * symbol appears at
the end of the string – thus the rotated wildcard query becomes n$m*.

▪ Next, we look up this string in the permuterm index, where seeking n$m*
(via a search tree) leads to rotations of (among others) the terms man and
moron.

▪ Now that the permuterm index enables us to identify the original

vocabulary terms matching a wildcard query, we look up these terms in
the standard inverted index to retrieve matching documents.

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Permuterm query processing

▪ Rotate query wild-card to the right but what about a query such as fi*mo*er?

▪ In this case we first enumerate the terms in the dictionary that are in the
permuterm index of er$fi*.

▪ Not all such dictionary terms will have the string mo in the middle

▪ Filter these out by exhaustive enumeration, checking each candidate to see if it

contains mo.

▪ In this example, the term fishmonger would survive this filtering but filibuster
would not.

▪ Then run the surviving terms through the standard inverted index for
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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)

$a,ap,pr,ri,il,l$, $i,is,s$, $t,th,he,e$,

$c,cr,ru,
ue,el,le,es,st,t$, $m,mo,on,nt,h$
▪ $ is a special word boundary symbol

▪ Maintain a second inverted index from bigrams to dictionary

terms that match each bigram.
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Bigram index example

▪ The k-gram index finds terms based on a query consisting of
k-grams (here k=2).

$ mac madde
m e n
m amon amortiz
o g e
o along among
n

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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 we’d 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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SPELLING CORRECTION

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Spell correction
▪ There are two basic principles underlying most spelling
correction algorithms.

▪ Of various alternative correct spellings for a miss-spelled query, choose

the “nearest” one.

▪ When two correctly spelled queries are tied (or nearly tied), select the
one that is more common.

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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 Delhi.

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Document correction
▪ Especially needed for OCR’ed documents
▪ Correction algorithms are tuned for this:
▪ 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).

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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
▪ Webster’s 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.

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Isolated word correction

▪ Given a lexicon and a character sequence Q, return the words
in the lexicon closest to Q

▪ What’s “closest”?

▪ We’ll study several alternatives

▪ Edit distance (Levenshtein distance)
▪ Weighted edit distance
▪ n-gram overlap

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Edit distance (Levenshtein distance)

▪ Given two strings S1 and S2, 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 (Just 1 with transpose.)
▪ From cat to act is 2
▪ from cat to dog is 3.

▪ Generally found by dynamic programming.

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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.

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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

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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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K-gram indexes for spelling correction

▪ 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 don’t 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
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One option – Jaccard coefficient

▪ If the query is bord.
▪ Then Jaccard coefficient for the query word “bord”
and word “boardroom” is
JC = 2/(3+8-2) = .18
Whereas JC for query word “bord” and word “border”
is: JC = 3/(3+5-3) = .66

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Matching bigrams
▪ Consider the query lord – we wish to identify words
matching 2 of its 3 bigrams (lo, or, rd)

l alon lore slot

o e h
o borde lore morbi
r r d
r arden borde car
d t r d

Standard postings “merge” will enumerate …

Adapt this to using Jaccard (or another) measure.
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Context-sensitive spell correction

▪ Isolated-term correction would fail to correct
typographical errors.
E.g.
Text: I flew from Heathrow to Delhi.
Consider the phrase query “flew form Heathrow”
We’d 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.

▪ Look for biwords that need only one term corrected.

▪ Enumerate only phrases containing “common”

(popular) 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

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SOUNDEX

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Soundex
▪ Our final technique for tolerant retrieval has to do with
phonetic correction: misspellings that arise because the user
types a query that sounds like the target term.

▪ Such algorithms are especially applicable to searches on the

names of people.

▪ The main idea here is to generate, for each term, a “phonetic

hash” so that similar-sounding terms hash to the same value.

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Soundex algorithm scheme

▪ Turn every token to be indexed into a 4-character reduced
form.

▪ Build an inverted index from these reduced forms to the

original terms; call this the soundex index.

▪ Do the same with query terms

▪ When the query calls for a soundex match, search this

soundex index.

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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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Questions
▪ Beijing
▪ Peking

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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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