CI-6226

Lecture 5. Scoring, Term

Weighting, Vector Space Model.
Part 1
Information Retrieval and Analysis

Vasily Sidorov

1
Recap of last lecture
▪ Collection and vocabulary statistics: Heaps’ and Zipf’s laws
▪ Dictionary compression for Boolean indexes
▪ Dictionary string, blocks, front coding
▪ Postings compression: Gap encoding, prefix-unique codes
▪ Variable-Byte and Gamma codes
collection (text, xml markup etc) 3,600.0 MB
collection (text) 960.0
Term-doc incidence matrix 40,000.0
postings, uncompressed (32-bit words) 400.0
postings, uncompressed (20 bits) 250.0
postings, variable byte encoded 116.0
postings, g-encoded 101.0
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Agenda
▪ Ranked retrieval
▪ Scoring documents
▪ Term frequency
▪ Collection statistics
▪ Weighting schemes
▪ Vector space scoring

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Ranked retrieval
▪ Thus far, our queries have all been Boolean
▪ Documents either match or don’t
▪ Good for expert users with precise understanding of
their needs and the collection
▪ Also good for applications: programs can easily consume
1000s of results
▪ Not good for the majority of users
▪ Most users incapable of writing Boolean queries (or they
are, but it’s too much work)
▪ Most users don’t want to go through 1000s of results
▪ This is particularly true of web search
4
 Ch. 6

Problem with Boolean search:

feast or famine
▪ Boolean queries often result in either too few (=0) or
too many (1000s) results
▪ Query 1: “standard user dlink 650” → 200,000 hits
▪ Query 2: “standard user dlink 650 no card found”: 0
hits
▪ It takes a lot of skill to come up with a query that
produces a manageable number of hits
▪ AND gives too few; OR gives too many

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Ranked retrieval models
▪ Rather than a set of documents satisfying a query
expression, in ranked retrieval, the system returns an
ordering over the (top) documents in the collection
for a query
▪ Free text queries: Rather than a query language of
operators and expressions, the user’s query is just
one or more words in a human language
▪ In principle, these are two separate choices, but in
practice, ranked retrieval has normally been
associated with free text queries and vice versa
6
 Ch. 6

Feast or famine: not a problem in

ranked retrieval
▪ When a system produces a ranked result set, large
result sets are not an issue:
▪ We just show the top k ( ≈ 10) results
▪ We don’t overwhelm the user

▪ Premise: the ranking algorithm works

7
 Ch. 6

Scoring as the basis of ranked retrieval

▪ We wish to return the documents ordered by
decreasing usefulness to the searcher
▪ How can we rank-order the documents in the
collection with respect to a query?
▪ Assign a score – say in [0, 1] – to each document
▪ This score measures how well document and query
“match”

8
 Ch. 6

Query-document matching scores

▪ We need a way of assigning a score to a
query/document pair
▪ Let’s start with a one-term query
▪ If the query term does not occur in the document,
score should be 0
▪ The more frequent the query term in the document,
the higher the score (should be)
▪ We will look at a number of alternatives for this

9
 Ch. 6

Take 1: Jaccard coefficient

▪ Recall: A commonly used measure of overlap of two
sets A and B
▪ jaccard(A,B) = |A ∩ B| / |A ∪ B|
▪ jaccard(A,A) = 1
▪ jaccard(A,B) = 0 if A ∩ B = 0
▪ A and B don’t have to be the same size
▪ Always assigns a number between 0 and 1

10
 Ch. 6

Jaccard coefficient: Scoring example

▪ What is the query-document match score that the
Jaccard coefficient computes for each of the two
documents below?
▪ Query: ides of march
▪ Document 1: caesar died in march
▪ Document 2: the long march

11
 Ch. 6

Issues with Jaccard for scoring

▪ It doesn’t consider term frequency (how many times
a term occurs in a document)
▪ Rare terms in a collection are more informative than
frequent terms. Jaccard doesn’t consider this
information
▪ We need a more sophisticated way of normalizing for
length
▪ Later in this lecture, we’ll use | A  B | / | A  B |
▪ . . . instead of |A ∩ B|/|A ∪ B| (Jaccard) for length
normalization.
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 Sec. 6.2

Recall: Binary term-document

incidence matrix
Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth
Antony 1 1 0 0 0 1
Brutus 1 1 0 1 0 0
Caesar 1 1 0 1 1 1
Calpurnia 0 1 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 1 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 1 0 1 1 1 1
worser 1 0 1 1 1 0

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 Sec. 6.2

Term-document count matrices

▪

Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth
Antony 157 73 0 0 0 0
Brutus 4 157 0 1 0 0
Caesar 232 227 0 2 1 1
Calpurnia 0 10 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 57 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 2 0 3 5 5 1
worser 2 0 1 1 1 0
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Bag of words model
▪ Vector representation doesn’t consider the ordering
of words in a document
▪ John is quicker than Mary and Mary is quicker than
John have the same vectors
▪ This is called the bag of words model.
▪ In a sense, this is a step back: The positional index
was able to distinguish these two documents
▪ We will look at “recovering” positional information
later in this course
▪ For now: bag of words model
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Term frequency tf
▪ The term frequency tft,d of term t in document d is
defined as the number of times that t occurs in d
▪ We want to use tf when computing query-document
match scores. But how?
▪ Raw term frequency is not what we want:
▪ A document with 10 occurrences of the term is more
relevant than a document with 1 occurrence of the term
▪ But not 10 times more relevant
▪ Relevance does not increase proportionally with
term frequency
NB: frequency = count in IR
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 Sec. 6.2

Log-frequency weighting
▪

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 Sec. 6.2.1

Document frequency
▪ Rare terms are more informative than frequent terms
▪ Recall stop words
▪ Consider a term in the query that is rare in the
collection (e.g., arachnocentric)
▪ A document containing this term is very likely to be
relevant to the query arachnocentric
▪ → We want a high weight for rare terms like
arachnocentric.

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 Sec. 6.2.1

Document frequency, continued

▪ Frequent terms are less informative than rare terms
▪ Consider a query term that is frequent in the
collection (e.g., high, increase, line)
▪ A document containing such a term is more likely to
be relevant than a document that doesn’t
▪ But it’s not a sure indicator of relevance
▪ → For frequent terms, we want high positive weights
for words like high, increase, and line
▪ But lower weights than for rare terms
▪ We will use document frequency (df) to capture this
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 Sec. 6.2.1

idf weight
▪ dft is the document frequency of t: the number of
documents that contain t
▪ dft is an inverse measure of the informativeness of t
▪ dft  N
▪ We define the idf (inverse document frequency) of t
by
idf t = log10 ( N/dft )
▪ We use log (N/dft) instead of N/dft to “dampen” the effect
of idf.

Will turn out the base of the log is immaterial. 20

 Sec. 6.2.1

idf example, suppose N = 1 million

term dft idft
calpurnia 1
animal 100
sunday 1,000
fly 10,000
under 100,000
the 1,000,000

idf t = log10 ( N/dft )

There is one idf value for each term t in a collection.
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Effect of idf on ranking
▪ Does idf have an effect on ranking for one-term
queries, like
▪ iPhone
▪ idf has no effect on ranking one term queries
▪ idf affects the ranking of documents for queries with at
least two terms
▪ For the query capricious person, idf weighting makes
occurrences of capricious count for much more in the final
document ranking than occurrences of person.

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 Sec. 6.2.1

Collection vs. Document frequency

▪ The collection frequency of t is the number of
occurrences of t in the collection, counting
multiple occurrences
▪ Example:
Word Collection frequency Document frequency

insurance 10440 3997

try 10422 8760

▪ Which word is a better search term (and should

get a higher weight)?
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 Sec. 6.2.2

tf-idf weighting
▪ The tf-idf weight of a term is the product of its tf
weight and its idf weight.
w t ,d = log(1 + tf t ,d )  log 10 ( N / dft )

▪ Best known weighting scheme in information retrieval

▪ Note: the “-” in tf-idf is a hyphen, not a minus sign!
▪ Alternative names: tf.idf, tf x idf
▪ Increases with the number of occurrences within a
document
▪ Increases with the rarity of the term in the collection
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 Sec. 6.2.2

Score for a document given a query

Score(q,d) =  tf.idf t,d

t qd

▪ There are many variants

▪ How “tf” is computed (with/without logs)
▪ Whether the terms in the query are also weighted
▪…

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 Sec. 6.3

Binary → count → weight matrix

Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar The Tempest Hamlet Othello Macbeth
Antony 5.25 3.18 0 0 0 0.35
Brutus 1.21 6.1 0 1 0 0
Caesar 8.59 2.54 0 1.51 0.25 0
Calpurnia 0 1.54 0 0 0 0
Cleopatra 2.85 0 0 0 0 0
mercy 1.51 0 1.9 0.12 5.25 0.88
worser 1.37 0 0.11 4.15 0.25 1.95

Each document is now represented by a real-valued

vector of tf-idf weights ∈ R|V|

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 Sec. 6.3

Documents as vectors
▪ So we have a |V|-dimensional vector space
▪ Terms are axes of the space
▪ Documents are points or vectors in this space
▪ Very high-dimensional: tens of millions of
dimensions when you apply this to a web search
engine
▪ These are very sparse vectors - most entries are zero.

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 Sec. 6.3

Queries as vectors
▪ Key idea 1: Do the same for queries: represent them
as vectors in the space
▪ Key idea 2: Rank documents according to their
proximity to the query in this space
▪ proximity = similarity of vectors
▪ proximity ≈ inverse of distance
▪ Recall: We do this because we want to get away from
the you’re-either-in-or-out Boolean model.
▪ Instead: rank more relevant documents higher than
less relevant documents
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 Sec. 6.3

Formalizing vector space proximity

▪ First cut: distance between two points
▪ ( = distance between the end points of the two vectors)
▪ Euclidean distance?
▪ Euclidean distance is a bad idea . . .
▪ . . . because Euclidean distance is large for vectors of
different lengths.

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 Sec. 6.3

Why distance is a bad idea

The Euclidean
distance between q
and d2 is large even
though the
distribution of terms
in the query q and the
distribution of
terms in the
document d2 are
very similar.

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 Sec. 6.3

Use angle instead of distance

▪ Thought experiment: take a document d and append
it to itself. Call this document d′
▪ “Semantically” d and d′ have the same content
▪ The Euclidean distance between the two documents
can be quite large
▪ The angle between the two documents is 0,
corresponding to maximal similarity

▪ Key idea: Rank documents according to angle with

query
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 Sec. 6.3

From angles to cosines

▪ The following two notions are equivalent
▪ Rank documents in decreasing order of the angle between
query and document
▪ Rank documents in increasing order of
cosine(query, document)
▪ Cosine is a monotonically decreasing function for the
interval [0o, 180o]

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 Sec. 6.3

From angles to cosines

▪ But how – and why – should we be computing cosines?

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 Sec. 6.3

Length normalization
▪ A vector can be (length-)normalized by dividing each
of its components by its length – for this we use the
L2 norm: 
x 2 = ixi2

▪ Dividing a vector by its L2 norm makes it a unit

(length) vector (on surface of unit hypersphere)
▪ Effect on the two documents d and d′ (d appended
to itself) from earlier slide: they have identical
vectors after length-normalization.
▪ Long and short documents now have comparable weights
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 Sec. 6.3

cosine(query,document)
Dot product Unit vectors
  


V
  q•d q d qd
cos(q, d ) =   =  •  = i =1 i i
q d
 i=1 i
V V
qd q2
d 2
i =1 i

qi is the tf-idf weight of term i in the query

di is the tf-idf weight of term i in the document

cos(q,d) is the cosine similarity of q and d … or,

equivalently, the cosine of the angle between q and d.
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Cosine for length-normalized vectors
▪ For length-normalized vectors, cosine similarity is
simply the dot product (or scalar product):

cos(q,d ) = q • d =  qi di
V

i=1

for q, d length-normalized.

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Cosine similarity illustrated

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 Sec. 6.3

Computing cosine scores

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 Sec. 6.4

tf-idf weighting has many variants

Why is the base of the log in idf immaterial?

41
 Sec. 6.4

Weighting may differ in queries vs

documents
▪ Many search engines allow for different weightings
for queries vs. documents
▪ SMART Notation: denotes the combination in use in
an engine, with the notation ddd.qqq, using the
acronyms from the previous table
▪ A very standard weighting scheme is: lnc.ltc
▪ Document: logarithmic tf (l as first character), no idf
and cosine normalization
A bad idea?
▪ Query: logarithmic tf (l in leftmost column), idf (t in
second column), cosine normalization
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 tf-idf example: lnc.ltc
Document: car insurance auto insurance
Query: best car insurance
Term Query Document Pro
d
tf- tf-wt df idf wt n’liz tf-raw tf-wt wt n’liz
raw e e
auto 0 0 5000 2.3 0 0 1 1 1 0.52 0
best 1 1 50000 1.3 1.3 0.34 0 0 0 0 0
car 1 1 10000 2.0 2.0 0.52 1 1 1 0.52 0.27
insurance 1 1 1000 3.0 3.0 0.78 2 1.3 1.3 0.68 0.53
Exercise: what is N, the number of docs?
Doc length = 12 + 02 + 12 + 1.32  1.92
Score = 0+0+0.27+0.53 = 0.8 43
Summary – vector space ranking
▪ Represent the query as a weighted tf-idf vector
▪ Represent each document as a weighted tf-idf vector
▪ Compute the cosine similarity score for the query
vector and each document vector
▪ Rank documents with respect to the query by score
▪ Return the top K (e.g., K = 10) to the user

44
Summary: tf-idf weighting
▪ The tf-idf weight of a term is the product of its tf
weight and its idf weight.
w t ,d = (1 + log 10 tf t ,d )  log 10 ( N / df t )
▪ Best known weighting scheme in information retrieval
▪ Increases with the number of occurrences within a
document
▪ Increases with the rarity of the term in the collection

45
 Ch. 6

Summary: Queries as vectors

▪ Key idea 1: Do the same for queries: represent them
as vectors in the space
▪ Key idea 2: Rank documents according to their
proximity to the query in this space
▪ proximity = similarity of vectors

46
 Summary: cosine(query,document)
Dot product Unit vectors
  


V
  q•d q d qd
cos(q, d ) =   =  •  = i =1 i i
q d
 i=1 i
V V
qd q2
d 2
i =1 i

cos(q,d) is the cosine similarity of q and d … or,

equivalently, the cosine of the angle between q and d.
47