Introduction to

Information Storage and Retrieval

Chapter Four: Indexing

structure

•1
 Indexing: Basic Concepts
Indexing is an arrangement of index terms to permit fast
searching and reading memory space requirement
used to speed up access to desired information from
document collection as per users query such that
It enhances efficiency in terms of time for retrieval. Relevant
documents are searched and retrieved quick
Index file usually has index terms in a sorted order. Which list is
easier to search?
fox pig zebra hen ant cat dog lion ox
ant cat dog fox hen lion ox pig zebra
An index file consists of records, called index entries.
Index files are much smaller than the original file.
Remember Heaps Law: in 1 GB of text collection the vocabulary
has a size of only 5 MB. This size may be further reduced by
Linguistic pre-processing (or text operations).
The usual unit for indexing is the word
Index terms - are used to look up records in a file.
Major Steps in Index Construction
Source file: Collection of text document
A document can be described by a set of representative keywords called index
terms.
Index Terms Selection: apply text operations or preprocessing
Tokenize: identify words in a document, so that each document is represented
by a list of keywords or attributes
Stop words removal: words with high frequency are non-content bearing and
needs to be removed from text collection
Word stem: reduce words with similar meaning into their stem/root word
Term relevance weight: Different index terms have varying relevance when
used to describe document contents. This effect is captured through the assignment of
numerical weights to each index term of a document. There are different index terms
weighting methods: including TF, IDF,TF*IDF, …

Indexing structure: a set of index terms (vocabulary) are organized

in Index File to easily identify documents in which each term occurs
in.
 Basic Indexing Process
Documents to
be indexed. Friends, Romans, countrymen.

Token Tokenizer
stream. Friends Romans countrymen

Modified Linguistic friend roman countryman

tokens. preprocessor

Index File Indexer

friend 2 4

roman 1 2
Inverted file countryman 13 16
 Index file Evaluation Metrics
Running time of the main operations
Access/search time
How much is the running time to find the required search key
from the list?
Update time (Insertion time, Deletion time)
How much time it takes to update existing records in an attempt
to add new terms or delete existing unnecessary terms?
Is the indexing structure allows incremental update or
reindexing?
Space overhead
Computer storage space consumed for keeping the list .
 Building Index file
An index file of a document is a file consisting of a list of
index terms and a link to one or more documents that has
the index term
An index file is list of search terms that are organized for
associative look-up, i.e., to answer user’s query:
In which documents does a specified search term appear?
Where within each document does each term appear? (There may
be several occurrences.)

For organizing index file for a collection of documents,

there are various options available:
Decide what data structure and/or file structure to use. Is it
sequential file, inverted file, suffix tree, etc. ?
 Sequential File
•Sequential file is the most primitive file structures.
• It has no vocabulary as well as linking pointers.
•The records are generally arranged serially, one after
another, but in lexicographic order on the value of
some key field.
• a particular attribute is chosen as primary key whose value
will determine the order of the records.
• when the first key fails to discriminate among records, a
second key is chosen to give an order.
 Example:
Given a collection of documents, they are parsed to
extract words and these are saved with the Document
ID.

I did enact Julius

Doc 1 Caesar I was killed
I the Capitol;
Brutus killed me.

So let it be with
Doc 2 Caesar. The noble
Brutus has told you
Caesar was ambitious
Sorting the Vocabulary
Term Doc #
I 1
After all did 1
Sequential file
enact 1
documents have julius 1
Doc
caesar 1
been tokenized, I 1 Term No.
stopwords are was
killed
1
1 1 ambition 2
removed, and I 1
2 brutus 1
the 1
normalization and capitol 1 3 brutus 2
stemming are brutus
killed
1
1 4 capitol 1
applied, to me 1
5 caesar 1
generate index so 2
let 2
6 caesar 2
terms it 2
be 2 7 caesar 2
These index terms with 2
caesar 2 8 enact 1
in sequential file the 2
9 julius 1
are sorted in noble
brutus
2
2 10 kill 1
alphabetical order hath
told
2
2 11 kill 1
you 2
caesar 2 12 noble 2
was 2
ambitious 2
 Sequential File
To access records search serially;
starting at the first record read and investigate all the succeeding
records until the required record is found or end of the file is
reached.
Its main advantages:
easy to implement;
provides fast access to the next record using lexicographic order.
Can be searched quickly, using binary search, O(log n)
Update options: Is the index needs to be rebuilt or incremental
update is supported?
Its disadvantages:
No weights attached to terms.
Random access is slow: since similar terms are indexed individually,
we need to find all terms that match with the query
 Inverted file
A word oriented indexing mechanism based on sorted list
of keywords, with each keyword having links to the
documents containing it
 Building and maintaining an inverted index is a relatively low cost
risk. On a text of n words an inverted index can be built in O(n)
time
 This list is inverted from a list of terms in location order to a list of
terms in alphabetical order.

Word Extraction Word IDs

Original
Documents •W1:d1,d2,d3
•W2:d2,d4,d7,d9
•…
•Wn :di,…dn
Document IDs

•Inverted Files
 Inverted file
Data to be held in the inverted file includes
The vocabulary (List of terms): is the set of all distinct
words (index terms) in the text collection.
Having information about vocabulary (list of terms) speeds searching
for relevant documents
For each term: it contains information related to
Location: all the text locations/positions where the word occurs
frequency of occurrence of terms in a document collection
TF , number of occurrences of term t in document d
ij j i
DF , number of documents containing t
j j
CF, total frequency of t in the corpus n
j
m , maximum frequency of any term in d
i i
n, total number of documents in a collection
….
 Inverted file
Having information about the location of each term within the
document helps for:
user interface design: highlight location of search term
proximity based ranking: adjacency and near operators (in Boolean
searching)

Having information about frequency is used for:

calculating term weighting (like TF, TF*IDF, …)
optimizing query processing
 Inverted File
Documents are organized by the terms/words they contain
Term CF Doc ID TF Location
term 1 3 2 1 66
This is called
19 1 213 an index file.
29 1 45
term 2 4 3 1 94
19 2 7, 212 Text operations
are performed
22 1 56
before building
term 3 1 5 1 43 the index.
term 4 3 11 2 3, 70
34 1 40

Is it possible to keep all these information during searching?

 Construction of Inverted file
An inverted index consists of two files: vocabulary and
posting files
A vocabulary file (Word list):
stores all of the distinct terms (keywords) that appear in any of
the documents (in lexicographical order) and
For each word a pointer to posting file

Records kept for each term j in the word list contains the
following:
term j
number of documents in which term j occurs (DF )
j
Collection frequency of term j
pointer to inverted (postings) list for term j
 Postings File (Inverted List)
For each distinct term in the vocabulary, stores a list of
pointers to the documents that contain that term.
Each element in an inverted list is called a posting, i.e., the
occurrence of a term in a document
It is stored as a separate inverted list for each column, i.e.,
a list corresponding to each term in the index file.
Each list consists of one or many individual postings

Advantage of dividing inverted file:

Keeping a pointer in the vocabulary to the list in the
posting file allows:
the vocabulary to be kept in memory at search time even for large
text collection, and
Posting file to be kept on disk for accessing to documents
General structure of Inverted File
The following figure shows the general structure of
inverted index file.
 Organization of Index File
Vocabulary
Postings
(word list) Documents
(inverted list)
Pointer
Term DF TF To
posting

term 1 3 3 Inverted
term 2 3 4 lists

term 3 1 1
term 4 2 3
 Example:
Given a collection of documents, they are parsed to
extract words and these are saved with the Document
ID.

I did enact Julius

Doc 1 Caesar I was killed
I the Capitol;
Brutus killed me.

So let it be with
Doc 2 Caesar. The noble
Brutus has told you
Caesar was ambitious
 Sorting the Vocabulary Term Doc #
Term Doc # ambitious 2
I 1 be 2
After all documents did 1 brutus 1
enact 1 brutus 2
have been tokenized julius 1 capitol 1
the inverted file is caesar
I
1
1
caesar
caesar
1
2
sorted by terms was
killed
1
1
caesar 2
did 1
I 1 enact 1
the 1 has 1
capitol 1 I 1
brutus 1 I 1
killed 1 I 1
me 1 it 2
so 2
julius 1
let 2
killed 1
it 2
killed 1
be 2
let 2
with 2
caesar 2 me 1
the 2 noble 2
noble 2 so 2
brutus 2 the 1
hath 2 the 2
told 2 told 2
you 2 you 2
caesar 2 was 1
was 2 was 2
ambitious 2 with 2
 Remove stop words, stemming & compute
frequency
Multiple term
Term Doc #
entries in a ambition 2 Term Doc # TF
single brutus 1 ambition 2 1
document are brutus 2 brutus 1 1
merged and capitol 1 brutus 2 1
frequency capitol 1 1
caesar 1
information caesar 1 1
caesar 2
added caesar 2 2
caesar 2
Counting enact 1 1
enact 1
number of julius 1 julius 1 1
occurrence of kill 1 kill 1 2
terms in the kill 1 noble 2 1
collections noble 2
helps to
compute TF
 Vocabulary and postings file
The file is commonly split into a Dictionary and a Posting file
vocabulary posting
Term Doc # TF Term DF CF Doc # TF
ambition 2 1
ambitious 1 1 2 1
brutus 1 1 1 1
brutus 2 1 brutus 2 2
2 1
capitol 1 1 capitol 1 1
1 1
caesar 1 1 caesar 2 3 1 1
caesar 2 2 enact 1 1 2 2
enact 1 1 julius 1 1 1 1
julius 1 1 kill 1 2 1 1
kill 1 2 1 2
noble 1 1
noble 2 1 2 1

Pointers
 Searching on Inverted File
Since the whole index file is divided into two, searching
can be done faster by loading vocabulary list which takes
less memory even for large document collection
Using binary Search the searching takes logarithmic time
The search is in the vocabulary lists

Updating inverted file is very complex.

We need to update both vocabulary and posting files
 Example: Create Inverted file
Map the file names to file IDs
Consider the following Original Documents

D1 The Department of Computer Science was established in

1984.
D2 The Department launched its first BSc in Computer
Studies in 1987.
D3 Followed by the MSc in Computer Science which was
started in 1991.
D4 The Department also produced its first PhD graduate in
1994.
D5 Our staff have contributed intellectually and
professionally to the advancements in these fields.
 Suffix tree
What is Suffix? A suffix is a substring that exists at the end of the
given string.
Each position in the text is considered as a text suffix

If txt=t t ...t ...t is a string, then T =t , t ...t is the suffix of txt that starts at
1 2 i n i i i+1 n
position i, where 1≤ i ≤ n
Example: txt = mississippi txt = GOOGOL
T1 = mississippi; T1 = GOOGOL
T2 = ississippi; T2 = OOGOL
T3 = ssissippi; T3 = OGOL
T4 = sissippi; T4 = GOL
T5 = issippi; T5 = OL
T6 = ssippi; T6 = L
T7 = sippi;
T8 = ippi; Exercise: generate suffix of “technology” ?
T9 = ppi;
T10 = pi;
T11 = i;
 Suffix trie
•A suffix trie is an ordinary trie in which the input
strings are all possible suffixes.
–Principles: The idea behind suffix TRIE is to assign to each
symbol in a text an index corresponding to its position in the
text. (i.e: First symbol has index 1, last symbol has index n
(#of symbols in text).
• To build the suffix TRIE we use these indices instead of the
actual object.
•The structure has several advantages:
–It requires less storage space.
–We do not have to worry how the text is represented (binary,
ASCII, etc).
–We do not have to store the same object twice (no
duplicate).
 Suffix Trie
•Construct suffix trie for the following string: GOOGOL
•We begin by giving a position to every suffix in the text starting
from left to right as per characters occurrence in the string.
• TEXT: GOOGOL$
POSITION: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
•Build a SUFFIX TRIE for all n suffixes of the text.
•Note: The resulting tree has n leaves and height n.

• This structure is
particularly useful
for any application
requiring prefix
based ("starts
with") pattern
matching.
 Suffix tree
A suffix tree is an extension of
suffix trie that construct a Trie of
all the proper suffixes of S
The suffix tree is created by •O
compacting unary nodes of the
suffix TRIE.
We store pointers rather than
words in the leaves.
It is also possible to replace
strings in every edge by a pair
(a,b), where a & b are the
beginning and end index of the
string. i.e.
(3,7) for OGOL$
(1,2) for GO
(7,7) for $
Example: Suffix tree
•Let s=abab, a suffix tree of s is a
compressed trie of all suffixes of s=abab$
•We label each leaf with the
starting point of the
•{ corresponding suffix.
• $ •$
• b$ •ab
•b •5
• ab$ •$
• bab$
• •$ •ab$ •4
•ab$
abab$ } •3
•2
•1
 Generalized suffix tree
• Given a set of strings S, a generalized suffix tree of S is a
compressed trie of all suffixes of s  S
• To make suffixes prefix-free we add a special char, $, at the end of
s. To associate each suffix with a unique string in S add a different
special symbol to each s
• Build a suffix tree for the string s1$s2#, where `$' and `#'
are a special terminator for s1,s2.
• Ex.: Let s1=abab & s2=aab, a generalized suffix tree for s1 & s2 is:
•a •$ •#
•{ •b
• $ # •# •5 •4
• b$ b# •b
•ab$ •ab$ •$
• ab$ ab# •3
• bab$ aab# •ab$ •# •4
•$ •1
•2
• abab$ •1 •2
•3
 Search in suffix tree
Searching for all instances of a substring S in a suffix tree is easy
since any substring of S is the prefix of some suffix.
Pseudo-code for searching in suffix tree:
Start at root
Go down the tree by taking each time the corresponding path
If S correspond to a node then return all leaves in sub-tree
the places where S can be found are given by the pointers in all the leaves in
the subtree rooted at x.
If S encountered a NIL pointer before reaching the end, then S is
not in the tree
Example:
If S = "GO" we take the GO path and return:
GOOGOL$,GOL$.
If S = "OR" we take the O path and then we hit a NIL pointer so
"OR" is not in the tree.
 Exercise
Given the following index terms:
worker, word, world, run & information
construct index file using suffix tree?
 Suffix Tree Applications
Suffix Tree can be used to solve a large number of string
problems that occur in:
text-editing,
free-text search,
etc.

Some examples of string problems are given below.

String matching
Longest Common Substring
Longest Repeated Substring
Palindromes
etc..
 Complexity Analysis
The suffix tree for a string has been built in O(n2) time.
Searching is very fast: The search time is linear in the
length of string S.
The number of leaves is n+1, where n is the number of input
strings.
Furthermore, in the leaves, we may store either the strings
themselves or pointers to the strings (that is, integers).
Searching for a substring[1..m], in string[1..n], can be
solved in O(m) time.
Expensive memory-wise
Suffix trees consume a lot of space
How many bytes required to store MISSISSIPI ?