Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Boolean Retrieval
Terminology
• In the context of a user interacting with an IR system
– Document: unit of retrieval
– Each document has a Doc Id
– Corpus: collection of documents
– User has information need
– User inputs a query to system
– Term: a unit of information (e.g., a word/phrase)
– Relevance of documents to query/info need
• Ad hoc retrieval task
For most of this lecture
• Corpus: collection of plays of Shakespeare
• Document: an individual play
• Query: a Boolean expression having terms connected
with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
Sec. 1.1
Unstructured data in 1620
• Which plays of Shakespeare contain the words
Brutus AND Caesar but NOT Calpurnia?
• One could grep all of Shakespeare’s plays for
Brutus and Caesar, then strip out lines containing
Calpurnia?
• Why is that not the answer?
– Slow (for large corpora)
– NOT Calpurnia is non-trivial
– Other operations (e.g., find the word Romans near
countrymen) not feasible
– Ranked retrieval (best documents to return)
• Later lectures
4
Sec. 1.1
Term-document incidence matrices
Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth
Antony 1 1 0 0 0 1
Brutus 1 1 0 1 0 0
Caesar 1 1 0 1 1 1
Calpurnia 0 1 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 1 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 1 0 1 1 1 1
worser 1 0 1 1 1 0
Brutus AND Caesar BUT NOT 1 if play contains
Calpurnia word, 0 otherwise
Sec. 1.1
Incidence vectors
• So we have a 0/1 vector for each term.
• To answer query: take the vectors for Brutus,
Caesar and Calpurnia (complemented) è
bitwise AND. Antony
Antony and Cleopatra
1
Julius Caesar
1
The Tempest
0
Hamlet
0
Othello
0
Macbeth
1
Brutus 1 1 0 1 0 0
– 110100 AND Caesar
Calpurnia
1
0
1
1
0
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
Cleopatra 1 0 0 0 0 0
– 110111 AND mercy
worser
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
– 101111 =
– 100100
6
Sec. 1.1
Answers to query
• Antony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene ii
Agrippa [Aside to DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS]: Why, Enobarbus,
When Antony found Julius Caesar dead,
He cried almost to roaring; and he wept
When at Philippi he found Brutus slain.
• Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii
Lord Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar I was killed i’ the
Capitol; Brutus killed me.
7
Sec. 1.1
Bigger collections
• Consider N = 1 million documents, each with
about 1000 words.
• Avg 6 bytes/word including
spaces/punctuation
– 6GB of data in the documents.
• Say there are M = 500K distinct terms among
these.
8
Sec. 1.1
Can’t build the matrix
• 500K x 1M matrix has half-a-trillion 0’s and
1’s.
Why?
• But it has no more than one billion 1’s.
– matrix is extremely sparse.
• What’s a better representation?
– We only record the 1 positions.
9
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
The Inverted Index
The key data structure underlying
modern IR
Sec. 1.2
Inverted index
• For each term t, we must store a list of all
documents that contain t.
– Identify each doc by a docID, a document serial
number
• Can we use fixed-size arrays for this?
Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101
What happens if the word Caesar
is added to document 14? 11
Sec. 1.2
Inverted index
• We need variable-size postings lists
– On disk, a continuous run of postings is normal
and best
– In memory, can use linked lists or variable length
arrays Posting
• Some tradeoffs in size/ease of insertion
Brutus 1 2 4 11 31 45 173 174
Caesar 1 2 4 5 6 16 57 132
Calpurnia 2 31 54 101
Dictionary Postings
Sorted by docID (more later on why).
12
Sec. 1.2
Inverted index construction
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
Initial stages of text processing
• Tokenization
– Cut character sequence into word tokens
• Deal with “John’s”, a state-of-the-art solution
• Normalization
– Map text and query term to same form
• You want U.S.A. and USA to match
• Stemming
– We may wish different forms of a root to match
• authorize, authorization
• Stop words
– We may omit very common words (or not)
• the, a, to, of
Sec. 1.2
Indexer steps: Token sequence
• Sequence of (Modified token, Document ID) pairs.
Doc 1 Doc 2
I did enact Julius So let it be with
Caesar I was killed Caesar. The noble
i’ the Capitol; Brutus hath told you
Brutus killed me. Caesar was ambitious
Sec. 1.2
Indexer steps: Sort
• Sort by terms
– And then docID
Core indexing step
Sec. 1.2
Indexer steps: Dictionary & Postings
• Multiple term entries
in a single document
are merged.
• Split into Dictionary
and Postings
• Document frequency
information is added
to dictionary.
Why frequency?
Will discuss later.
Sec. 1.2
Where do we pay in storage?
Lists of
docIDs
Terms
and
counts
IR system
implementation
• How do we
index efficiently?
• How much
storage do we
need?
Pointers 18
Practical considerations
• For a practical IR system handling a huge corpus
• The dictionary will be stored in the memory
• Postings lists will be stored on disk
• Ideally, retrieve (from disk) only those postings lists
that are needed to answer a query
Introduction to
Information Retrieval
Query processing with an inverted index
Sec. 1.3
The index we just built
• How do we process a query? Our focus
– Later - what kinds of queries can we process?
Brutus AND Caesar
21
Sec. 1.3
Query processing: AND
• Consider processing the query:
Brutus AND Caesar
– Locate Brutus in the Dictionary;
• Retrieve its postings.
– Locate Caesar in the Dictionary;
• Retrieve its postings.
– “Merge” the two postings (intersect the
document sets):
2 4 8 16 32 64 128 Brutus
1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 Caesar
22
Sec. 1.3
The 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
1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 Caesar
If the list lengths are x and y, the merge takes O(x+y)
operations.
Crucial: postings sorted by docID.
23
Intersecting two postings lists
(a “merge” algorithm)
24
Sec. 1.3
Boolean queries: Exact match
• The Boolean retrieval model is being able to ask a
query that is a Boolean expression:
– Boolean Queries are queries using AND, OR and NOT
to join query terms
• Views each document as a set of words
• Is precise: document matches condition or not.
– Perhaps the simplest model to build an IR system on
• Primary commercial retrieval tool for 3 decades.
• Many search systems you still use are Boolean:
– Email, library catalog, Mac OS X Spotlight
25
Sec. 1.4
Example: WestLaw http://www.westlaw.com/
• Largest commercial (paying subscribers) legal search
service (started 1975; ranking added 1992; new
federated search added 2010)
• Tens of terabytes of data; ~700,000 users
• Majority of users still use boolean queries
• Example query:
– What is the statute of limitations in cases involving
the federal tort claims act?
– LIMIT! /3 STATUTE ACTION /S FEDERAL /2 TORT
/3 CLAIM
• /3 = within 3 words, /S = in same sentence
26
Sec. 1.3
Boolean queries:
More general merges
• Exercise: Adapt the merge for the query:
Brutus AND NOT Caesar
• Can we still run through the merge in time
O(x+y)? What can we achieve?
27
Sec. 1.3
Query optimization
• What is the best order for query processing?
• Consider a query that is an AND of n terms.
• For each of the n terms, get its postings, then
AND them together.
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 16 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16
Query: Brutus AND Calpurnia AND Caesar 28
Sec. 1.3
Query optimization example
• Process in order of increasing freq:
– start with smallest set, then keep cutting further.
This is why we kept
document freq. in dictionary
Brutus 2 4 8 16 32 64 128
Caesar 1 2 3 5 8 16 21 34
Calpurnia 13 16
Execute the query as (Calpurnia AND Brutus) AND Caesar.
29
Sec. 1.3
More general optimization
• e.g., (madding OR crowd) AND (ignoble OR
strife)
• Get doc. freq.’s for all terms.
• Estimate the size of each OR by the sum of its
doc. freq.’s (conservative).
• Process in increasing order of OR sizes.
30
Exercise
• Recommend a query
processing order for
(tangerine OR trees) AND
Term Freq
(marmalade OR skies) AND eyes 213312
(kaleidoscope OR eyes) kaleidoscope 87009
marmalade 107913
• Which two terms should we skies 271658
process first? tangerine 46653
trees 316812
31
Exercise
• Recommend a query
processing order for
(tangerine OR trees) AND
Term Freq
(marmalade OR skies) AND eyes 213312
(kaleidoscope OR eyes) kaleidoscope 87009
marmalade 107913
• Which two terms should we skies 271658
process first? tangerine 46653
trees 316812
32
Does Google use the Boolean model?
§On Google, the default interpretation of a query [w1 w2 . . .wn] is w1 AND w2 AND . .
.AND wn
§Cases where you get hits that do not contain one of the wi :
§anchor text
§page contains variant of wi (morphology, spelling correction,
synonym)
§long queries (n large)
§boolean expression generates very few hits
§Simple Boolean vs. Ranking of result set
§Simple Boolean retrieval returns matching documents in no
particular order.
§Google (and most well designed Boolean engines) rank the result
set – they rank good hits (according to some estimator of
relevance) higher than bad hits.
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