Preparing the Text for Indexing

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Collecting the Documents

Tokenizer

Token stream. Friends Romans Countrymen

Linguistic modules

Modified tokens. friend roman countryman

Indexer

Inverted index.

friend

roman

countryman

2 4

2

13 16

1

Documents tobe indexed.

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

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What exactly is “a document”?

What format is it in? pdf/word/excel/html?

What language is it in?What character set is in use?How easy is it to “read it in”?

Each of these is a classification problem, that can be tackled with machine learning.

But these tasks are often done heuristically …

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Complications: Format/language

What is a unit document? A file? A book? A chapter of a book? An email? An email with 5 attachments? A group of files (PPT or LaTeX in HTML)

Documents being indexed can include documents from many different languages

An index may have to contain terms of several languages.

Sometimes a document or its components can contain multiple languages/formats

French email with a German pdf attachment.

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Getting the Tokens

Tokenizer

Token stream. Friends Romans Countrymen

Linguistic modules

Modified tokens. friend roman countryman

Indexer

Inverted index.

friend

roman

countryman

2 4

2

13 16

1

Documents tobe indexed.

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

5

6

Words, Terms, Tokens, Types

Word – A delimited string of characters as it appears in the text.

Term – A “normalized” word (case, morphology, spelling etc); an equivalence class of words.

Token – An instance of a word or term occurring in a document.

Type – The same as a term in most cases; an equivalence class of tokens.

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Tokenization

Input: “Friends, Romans and Countrymen”Output: Tokens

Friends Romans Countrymen

Each such token is now a candidate for an index entry, after further processing

But what are valid tokens to emit?

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What is a valid token?

Finland’s capital Finland? Finlands? Finland’s?

Hewlett-Packard Hewlett and Packard as two tokens?

State-of-the-art break up hyphenated sequence.

co-education ?

San Francisco: one token or two? San Francisco-Los Angeles highway: how many tokens?Dr. Summer address is 35 Winter St., 23014-1234, RI, USA.

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Tokenization: Numbers

3/12/91 Mar. 12, 1991 3 Dec. 199152 B.C.B-52My PGP key is 324a3df234cb23e100.2.86.144

Often, don’t index as text.But often very useful: e.g., for looking up error codes on the web

Often, we index “meta-data” separately Creation date, format, etc.

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Tokenization: language issues

East Asian languages (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) have no spaces between words:

莎拉波娃现在居住在美国东南部的佛罗里达。 Not always guaranteed a unique tokenization

Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew) are written right to left, but certain items (e.g. numbers) written left to rightWords are separated, but letter forms within a word form complex ligatures

سنة في الجزائر االحتالل 132بعد 1962استقلت من عاما .الفرنسي

‘Algeria achieved its independence in 1962 after 132 years of French occupation.’

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Making sense of the Tokens

Tokenizer

Token stream. Friends Romans Countrymen

Linguistic modules

Modified tokens. friend roman countryman

Indexer

Inverted index.

friend

roman

countryman

2 4

2

13 16

1

Documents tobe indexed.

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

11

Linguistic Processing

NormalizationCapitalization/Case-foldingStop wordsStemmingLemmatization

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Linguistic Processing: Normalization

Need to “normalize” terms in indexed text & in query terms into the same form

We want to match U.S.A. and USA

We most commonly define equivalence classes of terms e.g., by deleting periods in a term

Alternative is to do asymmetric expansion:Enter: window Search: window, windowsEnter: windows Search: Windows, windowsEnter: Windows Search: Windows

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Normalization: other languages

Accents: résumé vs. resume.Most important criterion:

How are your users likely to write their queries for these words?

Even in languages that standardly have accents, users often may not type them

German: Tuebingen vs. Tübingen Should be equivalent

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Linguistic Processing: Case folding

Reduce all letters to lower case exception: upper case (in mid-sentence?)

e.g., General Motors Fed vs. fed SAIL vs. sail

Often best to lower case everything, since users will use lowercase regardless of ‘correct’ capitalization…

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Linguistic Processing: Stop Words

With a stop list, you exclude from dictionary entirely the commonest words. Why do it:

They have little semantic content: the, a, and, to, be They take a lot of space: ~30% of postings for top 30

You will measure this!

But the trend is away from doing this: You need them for:

Phrase queries: “King of Denmark” Various song titles, etc.: “Let it be”, “To be or not to be” “Relational” queries: “flights to London”

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Linguistic Processing: Stemming

Reduce terms to their “roots” before indexing

“Stemming” suggest crude affix chopping language dependent e.g., automate(s), automatic, automation all reduced to

automat.

Porter’s Algorithm Commonest algorithm for stemming English Results suggest at least as good as other stemming options You find the algorithm and several implementations at

http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/

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Typical rules in Porter

Rule Examplesses ss caresses caressies i butterflies butterfliing meeting meettional tion intentional intention

Weight of word sensitive rules (m>1) EMENT →

replacement → replaccement → cement

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An Example of Stemming

After introducing a generic search engine architecture, we examine each engine component in turn. We cover crawling, local Web page storage, indexing, and the use of link analysis for boosting search performance.

after introduc a gener search engin architectur, we examin each engin compon in turn.

we cover crawl, local web page storag, index, and the us of link analysi for boost search perform.

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Linguistic Processing: Lemmatization

Reduce inflectional/variant forms to base formE.g.,

am, are, be, is be car, cars, car's, cars' car

Lemmatization implies doing “proper” reduction to dictionary headword form

the boy's cars are different colors the boy car be different color

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Phrase queries

Want to answer queries such as “stanford university” – as a phrase

Thus the sentence “I went to university at Stanford” is not a match.

The concept of phrase queries has proven easily understood by users – they use quotes

about 10% of web queries are phrase queries In average a query is 2.3 words long. (Is it still the case?)

No longer suffices to store only <term : docs> entries

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Phrase queries via Biword Indices

Biwords: Index every consecutive pair of terms in the text as a phrase

For example the text “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” would generate the biwords

friends romans romans countrymen

Each of these biwords is now a dictionary term

Two-word phrase query-processing is now immediate (it works exactly like the one term process)

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Longer phrase queries

stanford university palo alto can be broken into the Boolean query on biwords:

stanford university AND university palo AND palo alto

Without examining each of the returned docs, we cannot verify that the docs matching the above Boolean query do contain the phrase.

Can have false positives! (Why?)

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Issues for biword indexes

False positives, as noted beforeIndex blowup due to bigger dictionary

For extended biword index, parsing longer queries into conjunctions:

E.g., the query tangerine trees, marmalade skies is parsed into tangerine trees AND trees marmalade AND marmalade skies

Not standard solution (for all biwords)

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Better solution: Positional indexes

Store, for each term, entries of the form:<number of docs containing term;doc1: position1, position2 … ;doc2: position1, position2 … ;etc.>

<be: 993427;1: 6 {7, 18, 33, 72, 86, 231};2: 2 {3, 149};4: 5 {17, 191, 291, 430, 434};5: 2 {363, 367}; …>

Which of docs 1,2,4,5could contain “to be

or not to be”?

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Processing a phrase query

Merge their doc:position lists to enumerate all positions with “to be or not to be”.

to, 993427:

2: 5{1,17,74,222,551}; 4: 5{8,16,190,429,433}; 7: 3{13,23,191}; ...

be, 178239:

1: 2{17,19}; 4: 5{17,191,291,430,434}; 5: 3{14,19,101}; ...

Same general method for proximity searches

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Extra Slides

Combination schemes

A positional index expands postings storage substantially (Why?)

Biword indexes and positional indexes approaches can be profitably combined

For particular phrases (“Michael Jackson”, “Britney Spears”) it is inefficient to keep on merging positional postings lists

Even more so for phrases like “The Who” But is useful for “miserable failure”

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Some Statistics

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Query 2013 results

2013 time

2011 results

2011 time

britney spears 409,000,000 0.24 99,000,000 0.09emmy noether 930,000 0.26 260,000 0.59

the who 9,440,000,000 0.27 848,000,000 0.09

wellesley college 4,330,000 0.21 979,000 0.07

worcester college 4,750,000 0.48 473,000 0.55

fast cars 181,000,000 0.27 24,300,000 0.11slow cars 158,000,000 0.36 553,000 0.23

sfjvrbfb wrla 1 0.29

IR: The not-so-exciting part

Tokenizer

Token stream. Friends Romans Countrymen

Linguistic modules

Modified tokens. friend roman countryman

Indexer

Inverted index.

friend

roman

countryman

2 4

2

13 16

1

Documents tobe indexed.

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

30

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Recap: The Inverted IndexFor each term t, we store a

sorted list of all documents that contain t.

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Dictionary Postings

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Intersecting two posting lists

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Does Google use the Boolean model?

The default interpretation of a query [w1 w2 . . .wn] is w1 AND w2 AND . . .AND wn

You also get hits that do not contain one of the wi:anchor textpage contains variant of wi (morphology, spelling correction, synonym)long queries (n > 10?)when boolean expression generates very few hits

Boolean vs. Ranking of result setMost well designed Boolean engines rank the Boolean result set they rank “good hits” higher than “bad hits” (according to some estimator of relevance)

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