Information Retrieval

Introduction

Dr Sharifullah Khan
NUST SEECS

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 Acknowledgement

These slides have been borrowed from:

Professor Dr. Raymond J. Mooney

Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin,

USA
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mooney/

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 Information Retrieval
(IR)
The indexing and retrieval of textual
documents.
Searching for pages on the World Wide
Web is the killer app.
Concerned firstly with retrieving relevant
documents to a query.
Concerned secondly with retrieving from
large sets of documents efficiently.

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 Typical IR Task

Given:
A corpus of textual natural-language
documents.
A user query in the form of a textual string.
Find:
A ranked set of documents that are relevant to
the query.

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 IR System

Document
corpus

Query IR
String System

1. Doc1
2. Doc2
Ranked 3. Doc3
Documents .
.

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 Relevance

Relevance is a subjective judgment and may

include:
Being on the proper subject.
Being timely (recent information).
Being authoritative (from a trusted source).
Satisfying the goals of the user and his/her
intended use of the information (information
need).

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 Keyword Search

Simplest notion of relevance is that the

query string appears verbatim in the
document.
Slightly less strict notion is that the words
in the query appear frequently in the
document, in any order (bag of words).

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 Problems with Keywords

May not retrieve relevant documents that

include synonymous terms.
restaurant vs. caf
PRC vs. China
May retrieve irrelevant documents that
include ambiguous terms.
bat (baseball vs. mammal)
Apple (company vs. fruit)
bit (unit of data vs. act of eating)
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 Beyond Keywords

We will cover the basics of keyword-based

IR, but
We will focus on extensions and recent
developments that go beyond keywords.
We will cover the basics of building an
efficient IR system, but
We will focus on basic capabilities and
algorithms rather than systems issues that
allow scaling to industrial size databases.
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 Intelligent IR

Taking into account the meaning of the

words used.
Taking into account the order of words in
the query.
Adapting to the user based on direct or
indirect feedback.
Taking into account the authority of the
source.

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 IR System Architecture

User Interface
Text
User
Text Operations
Need
Logical View
User Query Database
Feedback Operations Indexing
Manager
Inverted
file
Query Searching Index
Text
Ranked Retrieved Database
Docs Ranking Docs
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 IR System Components
Text Operations forms index words (tokens).
Stopword removal
Stemming
Indexing constructs an inverted index of
word to document pointers.
Searching retrieves documents that contain a
given query token from the inverted index.
Ranking scores all retrieved documents
according to a relevance metric.

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 IR System Components (continued)
User Interface manages interaction with the
user:
Query input and document output.
Relevance feedback.
Visualization of results.
Query Operations transform the query to
improve retrieval:
Query expansion using a thesaurus.
Query transformation using relevance feedback.

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 Web Search

Application of IR to HTML documents on

the World Wide Web.
Differences:
Must assemble document corpus by spidering
the web.
Can exploit the structural layout information
in HTML (XML).
Documents change uncontrollably.
Can exploit the link structure of the web.

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 Web Search System

Web Spider Document

corpus

Query IR
String System

1. Page1
2. Page2
3. Page3
Ranked
. Documents
.

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 Other IR-Related Tasks

Automated document categorization

Information filtering (spam filtering)
Information routing
Automated document clustering
Recommending information or products
Information extraction
Information integration
Question answering
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 History of IR

1960-70s:
Initial exploration of text retrieval systems for
small corpora of scientific abstracts, and law
and business documents.
Development of the basic Boolean and vector-
space models of retrieval.
Prof. Salton and his students at Cornell
University are the leading researchers in the
area.

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 IR History Continued

1980s:
Large document database systems, many run by
companies:
Lexis-Nexis
Dialog
MEDLINE

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 IR History Continued

1990s:
Searching FTPable documents on the Internet
Archie
WAIS
Searching the World Wide Web
Lycos
Yahoo
Altavista

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 IR History Continued

1990s continued:
Organized Competitions
NIST TREC
Recommender Systems
Ringo
Amazon
NetPerceptions
Automated Text Categorization & Clustering

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 IR History Continued

2000s
Link analysis for Web Search
Google
Automated Information Extraction
Parallel Processing
Map/Reduce
Question Answering
TREC Q/A track

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 IR History Continued

2000s continued:
Multimedia IR
Image
Video
Audio and music
Cross-Language IR
DARPA Tides
Document Summarization
Learning to Rank

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 Recent IR History

2010s
Intelligent Personal Assistants
Siri
Cortana
Google Now
Alexa
Complex Question Answering
IBM Watson
Distributional Semantics
Deep Learning
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 Related Areas

Database Management
Library and Information Science
Artificial Intelligence
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning

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 Database Management

Focused on structured data stored in

relational tables rather than free-form text.
Focused on efficient processing of well-
defined queries in a formal language (SQL).
Clearer semantics for both data and queries.
Recent move towards semi-structured data
(XML) brings it closer to IR.

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 Library and Information Science

Focused on the human user aspects of

information retrieval (human-computer
interaction, user interface, visualization).
Concerned with effective categorization of
human knowledge.
Concerned with citation analysis and
bibliometrics (structure of information).
Recent work on digital libraries brings it
closer to CS & IR.
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 Artificial Intelligence

Focused on the representation of knowledge,

reasoning, and intelligent action.
Formalisms for representing knowledge and
queries:
First-order Predicate Logic
Bayesian Networks
Recent work on web ontologies and
intelligent information agents brings it
closer to IR.
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 Natural Language Processing

Focused on the syntactic, semantic, and

pragmatic analysis of natural language text
and discourse.
Ability to analyze syntax (phrase structure)
and semantics could allow retrieval based
on meaning rather than keywords.

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 Natural Language Processing:
IR Directions
Methods for determining the sense of an
ambiguous word based on context (word
sense disambiguation).
Methods for identifying specific pieces of
information in a document (information
extraction).
Methods for answering specific NL
questions from document corpora or
structured data like FreeBase or Googles
Knowledge Graph. 29
 Machine Learning

Focused on the development of

computational systems that improve their
performance with experience.
Automated classification of examples
based on learning concepts from labeled
training examples (supervised learning).
Automated methods for clustering
unlabeled examples into meaningful
groups (unsupervised learning).
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 Machine Learning:
IR Directions
Text Categorization
Automatic hierarchical classification (Yahoo).
Adaptive filtering/routing/recommending.
Automated spam filtering.
Text Clustering
Clustering of IR query results.
Automatic formation of hierarchies (Yahoo).
Learning for Information Extraction
Text Mining
Learning to Rank 31
Thanks for your Kind Attention

Questions are welcomed

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