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 Ch. 3

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

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

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 Sec. 3.1

A naïve 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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Dictionary data structures

Two main choices:
Hashtables
Trees
Some IR systems use hashtables, some trees

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Hashtables
Each vocabulary term is hashed to an integer
(We assume you’ve 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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Tree: binary tree

Root
a-m n-z

a-hu hy-m n-sh si-z

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

Tree: B-tree

a-hu n-z
hy-m

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].
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.1

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 Sec. 3.2

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 Sec. 3.2

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.1

Permuterm index
For term hello, index under:
hello$, ello$h, llo$he, lo$hel, o$hell, $hello
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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.1

Permuterm query processing

Rotate query wild-card to the right
Now use B-tree lookup as before.
Permuterm problem: ≈ 10 x lexicon size

Empirical observation for English.

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

Bigram index example

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

$m mace madden

mo among amortize
on along among

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.2.2

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!

Search
Type your search terms, use ‘*’ if you need to.
E.g., Alex* will match Alexander.

Which web search engines allow wildcard queries? 19

Introduction to Information Retrieval

SPELLING CORRECTION

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3

Document correction
Especially needed for OCR’ed 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 don’t change the documents and
instead fix the query-document mapping
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.2

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.
(Including the mis-spellings)

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.2

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
If 2 corrections are tied, select the more common
Common in the collection
Common in the queries
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.3

Edit 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
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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.3

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

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, use the first letter of each term
One possibility is to use n-gram overlap for this
This can also be used by itself for spelling correction.

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

One option – Jaccard coefficient

A commonly-used measure of overlap
Let X and Y be two sets; then the J.C. is

X ∩Y / X ∪Y
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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.4

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

lo alone lore sloth

or border lore morbid
rd ardent border card

Standard postings “merge” will enumerate …

Adapt this to using Jaccard (or another) measure.
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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

Context-sensitive spell correction

Text: I flew from Heathrow to Narita.
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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.3.5

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval

SOUNDEX

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

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.

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 3.4

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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Introduction to Information Retrieval

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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