September 7, 2000Information Organization and Retrieval Introduction to Information Retrieval Ray Larson & Marti Hearst University of California, Berkeley

September 7, 2000 Information Organization and Retrieval

Introduction to Information Retrieval

Ray Larson & Marti Hearst

University of California, Berkeley

School of Information Management and Systems

SIMS 202: Information Organization and Retrieval


Search and RetrievalOutline of Part I of SIMS 202

• The Search Process• Information Retrieval Models• Content Analysis/Zipf Distributions• Evaluation of IR Systems

– Precision/Recall– Relevance– User Studies

• System and Implementation Issues• Web-Specific Issues• User Interface Issues• Special Kinds of Search


Today

• Finding Out About

• Introduction to Information Retrieval

• Introduction to the Boolean Model and Boolean Queries


Finding Out About(This discussion is drawn from R. Belew’s

manuscript)

• Three phases:– Asking of a question (the Information Need)– Construction of an answer (IR proper)– Assessment of the answer (Evaluation)

• Part of an iterative process


Question Asking• Person asking = “user”

– In a frame of mind, a cognitive state

– Aware of a gap in their knowledge

– May not be able to fully define this gap

• Paradox of FOA: – If user knew the question to ask, there would often be no work to

do. • “The need to describe that which you do not know in order to find it” Roland

Hjerppe

• Query– External expression of this ill-defined state


Question Answering

• Say question answerer is human.– Can they translate the user’s ill-defined question into a

better one?

– Do they know the answer themselves?

– Are they able to verbalize this answer?

– Will the user understand this verbalization?

– Can they provide the needed background?

• Say answerer is a computer system.


Assessing the Answer

• How well does it answer the question?– Complete answer? Partial? – Background Information?– Hints for further exploration?

• How relevant is it to the user?


IR is an Iterative Process

Repositories

Workspace

Goals


IR is a Dialog

– The exchange doesn’t end with first answer

– User can recognize elements of a useful answer

– Questions and understanding changes as the process

continues.


A sketch of a searcher… “moving through many actions towards a general goal of satisfactory

completion of research related to an information need.” (after Bates 89)

Q0

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5


Berry-picking model (cont.)

• The query is continually shifting

• New information may yield new ideas and new directions

• The information need– is not satisfied by a single, final retrieved set– is satisfied by a series of selections and bits of

information found along the way.


Information Seeking Behavior

• Two parts of the process:• search and retrieval

• analysis and synthesis of search results


Search Tactics and Strategies

• Search Tactics– Bates 79

• Search Strategies– Bates 89– O’Day and Jeffries 93


Tactics vs. Strategies

• Tactic: short term goals and maneuvers– operators, actions

• Strategy: overall planning– link a sequence of operators together to achieve

some end


• Later in the course:– Search Process and Strategies– User interfaces to improve IR process– Incorporation of Content Analysis into better

systems


Restricted Form of the IR Problem

• The system has available only pre-existing, “canned” text passages.

• Its response is limited to selecting from these passages and presenting them to the user.

• It must select, say, 10 or 20 passages out of millions or billions!


Information Retrieval

• Revised Task Statement:

Build a system that retrieves documents that users are likely to find relevant to their queries.

• This set of assumptions underlies the field of Information Retrieval.


Some IR History

– Roots in the scientific “Information Explosion” following WWII

– Interest in computer-based IR from mid 1950’s• H.P. Luhn at IBM (1958)

• Probabilistic models at Rand (Maron & Kuhns) (1960)

• Boolean system development at Lockheed (‘60s)

• Vector Space Model (Salton at Cornell 1965)

• Statistical Weighting methods and theoretical advances (‘70s)

• Refinements and Advances in application (‘80s)• User Interfaces, Large-scale testing and application (‘90s)


Structure of an IR SystemSearchLine Interest profiles

& QueriesDocuments

& data

Rules of the game =Rules for subject indexing +

Thesaurus (which consists of

Lead-InVocabulary

andIndexing

Language

StorageLine

Potentially Relevant

Documents

Comparison/Matching

Store1: Profiles/Search requests

Store2: Documentrepresentations

Indexing (Descriptive and

Subject)

Formulating query in terms of

descriptors

Storage of profiles

Storage of Documents

Information Storage and Retrieval System

Adapted from Soergel, p. 19



& QueriesDocuments

& data



Lead-InVocabulary

andIndexing

Language

StorageLine


Documents

Comparison/Matching




Subject)


descriptors

Storage of profiles






& QueriesDocuments

& data



Lead-InVocabulary

andIndexing

Language

StorageLine


Documents

Comparison/Matching




Subject)


descriptors

Storage of profiles






& QueriesDocuments

& data



Lead-InVocabulary

andIndexing

Language

StorageLine


Documents

Comparison/Matching




Subject)


descriptors

Storage of profiles





Relevance (introduction)• In what ways can a document be relevant to a

query?– Answer precise question precisely.

– Who is buried in grant’s tomb? Grant.

– Partially answer question.– Where is Danville? Near Walnut Creek.

– Suggest a source for more information.– What is lymphodema? Look in this Medical Dictionary.

– Give background information.– Remind the user of other knowledge.– Others ...


Query Languages

• A way to express the question (information need)

• Types: – Boolean– Natural Language– Stylized Natural Language– Form-Based (GUI)


Simple query language: Boolean

– Terms + Connectors (or operators)– terms

• words• normalized (stemmed) words• phrases• thesaurus terms

– connectors• AND• OR• NOT


Boolean Queries• Cat

• Cat OR Dog

• Cat AND Dog

• (Cat AND Dog)

• (Cat AND Dog) OR Collar

• (Cat AND Dog) OR (Collar AND Leash)

• (Cat OR Dog) AND (Collar OR Leash)


Boolean Queries

• (Cat OR Dog) AND (Collar OR Leash)– Each of the following combinations works:

• Cat x x x x• Dog x x x x x• Collar x x x x• Leash x x x x


Boolean Queries

• (Cat OR Dog) AND (Collar OR Leash)– None of the following combinations work:

• Cat x x

• Dog x x

• Collar x x

• Leash x x


Boolean Logic

A B

BABA

BABA

BAC

BAC

AC

AC

:Law sDeMorgan'


Boolean Queries– Usually expressed as INFIX operators in IR

• ((a AND b) OR (c AND b))

– NOT is UNARY PREFIX operator• ((a AND b) OR (c AND (NOT b)))

– AND and OR can be n-ary operators• (a AND b AND c AND d)

– Some rules - (De Morgan revisited)• NOT(a) AND NOT(b) = NOT(a OR b)

• NOT(a) OR NOT(b)= NOT(a AND b)

• NOT(NOT(a)) = a


Boolean Logic

t33

t11 t22

D11D22

D33

D44D55

D66

D88D77

D99

D1010

D1111

m1

m2

m3m5

m4

m7m8

m6

m2 = t1 t2 t3

m1 = t1 t2 t3

m4 = t1 t2 t3

m3 = t1 t2 t3

m6 = t1 t2 t3

m5 = t1 t2 t3

m8 = t1 t2 t3

m7 = t1 t2 t3


Boolean Searching“Measurement of thewidth of cracks in prestressedconcrete beams”

Formal Query:cracks AND beamsAND Width_measurementAND Prestressed_concrete

Cracks

Beams Widthmeasurement

Prestressedconcrete

Relaxed Query:(C AND B AND P) OR(C AND B AND W) OR(C AND W AND P) OR(B AND W AND P)


Psuedo-Boolean Queries

• A new notation, from web search– +cat dog +collar leash

• Does not mean the same thing!

• Need a way to group combinations.

• Phrases:– “stray cat” AND “frayed collar”– +“stray cat” + “frayed collar”

Informationneed

Index

Pre-process

Parse

Collections

Rank

Query

text input


Result Sets• Run a query, get a result set

• Two choices– Reformulate query, run on entire collection– Reformulate query, run on result set

• Example: Dialog query• (Redford AND Newman)• -> S1 1450 documents• (S1 AND Sundance)• ->S2 898 documents

Informationneed

Index

Pre-process

Parse

Collections

Rank

Query

text input

Reformulated Query

Re-Rank


Ordering of Retrieved Documents• Pure Boolean has no ordering• In practice:

– order chronologically

– order by total number of “hits” on query terms• What if one term has more hits than others?

• Is it better to one of each term or many of one term?

• Fancier methods have been investigated – p-norm is most famous

• usually impractical to implement

• usually hard for user to understand


Boolean• Advantages

– simple queries are easy to understand– relatively easy to implement

• Disadvantages– difficult to specify what is wanted– too much returned, or too little– ordering not well determined

• Dominant language in commercial systems until the WWW


Faceted Boolean Query

• Strategy: break query into facets (polysemous with earlier meaning of facets)

– conjunction of disjunctionsa1 OR a2 OR a3

b1 OR b2

c1 OR c2 OR c3 OR c4

– each facet expresses a topic“rain forest” OR jungle OR amazon

medicine OR remedy OR cure

Smith OR Zhou

AND

AND


Faceted Boolean Query

• Query still fails if one facet missing

• Alternative: Coordination level ranking– Order results in terms of how many facets (disjuncts)

are satisfied

– Also called Quorum ranking, Overlap ranking, and Best Match

• Problem: Facets still undifferentiated

• Alternative: assign weights to facets


Proximity Searches• Proximity: terms occur within K positions of one another

– pen w/5 paper

• A “Near” function can be more vague– near(pen, paper)

• Sometimes order can be specified• Also, Phrases and Collocations

– “United Nations” “Bill Clinton”

• Phrase Variants– “retrieval of information” “information retrieval”


Filters

• Filters: Reduce set of candidate docs• Often specified simultaneous with query• Usually restrictions on metadata

– restrict by:• date range• internet domain (.edu .com .berkeley.edu)• author• size• limit number of documents returned


Next Week

• Statistical Properties of Text

• Preparing information for search: Lexical analysis

• Introduction to the Vector Space model of IR.