Information Retrieval(1955-1992)
• Primary Users
– Law Clerks
– Reference Librarians
– (Some) News organizations, product research, congressional
committees, medical/chemical abstract searches
• Primary Search Models
– Boolean keyword searches on Abstract, Title, keyword
• Vendors
–
–
–
–
Mead Data Central(Lexis – Nexis)
Dialog
Westlaw
Total searchable online data : O(10 terabytes)
Information Retrieval(1993+)
•
Primary users
–
–
•
1st time computer users
novices
Primary search modes
–
–
•
Still Boolean keyword searches with limited probabilistic
models
But FULL TEXT Retrieval
Vendors
–
–
Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista, Google
Total online data : ???
Growth of the Web
# of web sites
or
Volume of web
traffic
?
Mosaic Netscape
Exponential
Growth
1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
Volume doubling every 6 months
Observation
• Early IR system basically extended library catalog
systems, allowing
– Keyword searches,
– Limited abstract searches
in addition to Author/Title/Subject and including Boolean
combination functionality
• IR was seen as reference retrieval
(full documents still had to be ordered/delivered by hand)
In Contrast
Today, IR has a much wider role in the age of digital libraries
• Full document retrieval
(hypertext, postscript or optical image(TIFF)
representations)
• Question answering
Old View
… AND … OR …
Funtion of IR :
Map queries to relevant documents
15
New View
1
8
Satisfy user’s information need
Infer goals/information need from:
- query itself
- past user query history
- User profiling(aol.com vs. CS dept.)
- Collective analysis of other user feedback on similar queries
In addition, return information in a format useful/intelligible to the
user
• weighted orderings
• clusterings of documents by different attributes
• visualization tools
** Text Understanding techniques to extract answer to questions
or at least subregion of text
Who is the current mayor of Columbus, Ohio?
don’t need full AP/CNN article on city scandals,
just the answer(and available source for proof)
Boolean Systems
Function #1 : Provide a fast, compact index into the database
(of documents or references)
Chihuahua
(granularity)
Index options
- Doc number
- Page number in Doc
- Actual word offset
Nanny
Data structure:
Inverted file
Boolean Operations
Chihuahua AND Nanny
g
Join (
Chihuahua OR Nanny
g
Union (  )
Proximity searches
Chihuhua W/3 Nanny
)
Vector IR model
d1
Find optimal f( )
V1
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
f(
d2
)
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
f(
)
V2
Sim (Vi , VQ) = Sim’ (Di , Q)
Sim (V1, V2)  Sim’ (d1 , d2)
Cosine distance
Query
Vector models
D1
D2
Query
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
V1
V2
Bit vector capturing
essence/meaning of D1
Sim (V1 , Q1)
Q1
Find max Sim (Vi , Q1)
Dimensionality Reduction
d1
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
_____________
f(
V1
)
Initial (term) vector representation
Dimensionality Reduction(SVD/LSI)
^
V1
More compact/reduced dimensionality
model of d1

V1
V1
D1
3
Japanese
Japan
Nippon
Japanese
Nihon
Japanese
Japanese ..
Clustering words
Offset K - hash(w)
- hash(cluster(w))
- hash(cluster(stem(w)))
5 Japan *
1
The
192

1
1
Raw Term
Vector
Condensed
Vector
Stem : books
computer
computation
book
comput
comput
d1 The soap opera
0
0
1
Soap
Opera
Soap opera
1
1
0
Soap
Opera
Soap opera
Collocation
(Phrasal
Term)
d2
The soap residue
an opera by Verdi
Vector g Abstractly is a compressed
document(meaning preserving)
m1
f(d1)
……
……
……
A meaning
or context
vector
representation
m2
document
f(d2)
……
……
……
document
Compression :
m1 = m2 iff d1 = d2 f( ) must be invertible
Summarization : m1 = m2 iff d1 and d2 are about the same thing
(mean the same thing)
What is the optimal method for meaning preserving compression?
Issues
• size of representation(ideally size(Vi) << size(Di))
• cost of computation of vectors
– one time cost at model creation
• cost of similarity function
• must be computed for each query
• crucial to speed that this be minimized
– header processing
retain/model cross references

Vi   1 V1   2 ref (V2 )   3 ref (V3 )
1. remark (most) function words
NOT or 2. downweight by frequency
3. use text analysis +
decide which function words carry meaning.
Supervised Learning/Training
Collective Discrimination
A
Chihuahua Breeding Club
C
J
Input
data
stream
recognizer
Junk mail
Personal
recognizer
Training
B
Project #1
In Real time
(ongoing)
recognizer
recognizer
B
A
C
J
Labelled
(routed)
output
Other related problems:
Mail/News Routing and Filtering
119
Data
Stream
121
125
131
Project #1 at work
Project #2 at work
Chihuahua breeding
Scuba club
Personal
Junk mail
Inboxes
(prioritize)
Typically model long-term information needs
(People put effort into training and user feedback that they aren’t willing
to invest for single query-based IR)
Features for classification
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Subject line
Source/Sender
X-annotations
Date/time
Length
Other recipients
Message content
(regions weighted differently)
Probabilistic IR models –
Intermediate Topic models/detectors
S

TV1
Topic
Detectors TDA
(Topic
Models)
f(
d1
TDB
000100
Q
100000
V1
010100
V2
TDE
V1
V2
)
f(
d2
)