Text Operations

Statistical Properties of Text

• How is the frequency of different words distributed?
• How fast does vocabulary size grow with the size of a
corpus?
• There are three well-known researcher who define
statistical properties of words in a text:
– Zipf’s Law: models word distribution in text corpus
– Luhn’s idea: measures word significance
– Heap’s Law: shows how vocabulary size grows with the growth
corpus size

• Such properties of text collection greatly affect the

performance of IR system & can be used to select
suitable term weights & other aspects of the system.
 Word Distribution
• A few words are very
common.
2 most frequent words
(e.g. “the”, “of”) can
account for about 10%
of word occurrences.
• Most words are very rare.
Half the words in a
corpus appear only
once, called “read only
once”
 Word distribution: Zipf's Law
• Zipf's Law- named after the Harvard linguistic professor
George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950),
 attempts to capture the distribution of the frequencies (i.e. ,
number of occurances ) of the words within a text.
• For all the words in a collection of documents, for each word w
f : is the frequency that w appears
r : is rank of w in order of frequency. (The most commonly
occurring word has rank 1, etc.)
f

Zipf’s Distribution of sorted word

distributions: w has rank r &
frequencies, according
Rank
frequency f to Zipf’s law
Frequency
Distribution

r
 Word distribution: Zipf's Law
• Zipf's Law states that when the distinct words in a text are
arranged in decreasing order of their frequency of occuerence (most
frequent words first), the occurence characterstics of the vocabulary
can be characterized by the constant rank-frequency law of Zipf.
• If the words, w, in a
collection are ranked, r,
by their frequency, f,
they roughly fit the
relation:
r*f=c
– Different collections
have different constants
c.

• The table shows the most frequently occurring words from 336,310 document corpus
containing 125, 720, 891 total words; out of which 508, 209 are unique words
 More Example: Zipf’s Law
• Illustration of Rank-Frequency Law. Let the total number of word
occurrences in the sample N = 1, 000, 000
Rank (R) Term Frequency (F) R.(F/N)
1 the 69 971 0.070
2 of 36 411 0.073
3 and 28 852 0.086
4 to 26 149 0.104
5 a 23237 0.116
6 in 21341 0.128
7 that 10595 0.074
8 is 10099 0.081
9 was 9816 0.088
10 he 9543 0.095
 Methods that Build on Zipf's Law
• Stop lists:
• Ignore the most frequent words (upper cut-off).
Used by almost all systems.

• Significant words:
• Take words in between the most frequent (upper
cut-off) and least frequent words (lower cut-off).

• Term weighting:
• Give differing weights to terms based on their
frequency, with most frequent words weighed
less. Used by almost all ranking methods.
 Word significance: Luhn’s Ideas
• Luhn Idea (1958): the frequency of word occurrence in a
text furnishes a useful measurement of word significance.
• Luhn suggested that both extremely common and extremely
uncommon words were not very useful for indexing.
• For this, Luhn specifies two cutoff points: an upper and a
lower cutoffs based on which non-significant words are
excluded
– The words exceeding the upper cutoff were considered to be
common
– The words below the lower cutoff were considered to be rare
– Hence they are not contributing significantly to the content of the
text
– The ability of words to discriminate content, reached a peak at a
rank order position half way between the two-cutoffs
• Let f be the frequency of occurrence of words in a text, and r their
rank in decreasing order of word frequency, then a plot relating f & r
yields the following curve
 Luhn’s Ideas

Luhn (1958) suggested that both extremely common and

extremely uncommon words were not very useful for document
representation & indexing.
 Vocabulary Growth: Heaps’ Law
• How does the size of the overall vocabulary (number of
unique words) grow with the size of the corpus?
– This determines how the size of the inverted index will scale with
the size of the corpus.
• Heap’s law: estimates the number of vocabularies in a
given corpus
– The vocabulary size grows by O(nβ), where β is a constant between
0 – 1.
– If V is the size of the vocabulary and n is the length of the corpus in
words, Heap’s provides the following equation:

• Where constants:
V Kn
– K  10100
–   0.40.6 (approx. square-root)
 Heap’s distributions
• Distribution of size of the vocabulary vs. total
number of terms extracted from text corpus

Example: from 1,000,000,000 documents, there

may be 1,000,000 distinct words.
 Example: Heaps Law
• We want to estimate the size of the vocabulary for a
corpus of 1,000,000 words.
• Assume that based on statistical analysis on smaller
corpora sizes:
– A corpus with 100,000 words contain 50,000 unique
words; and
– A corpus with 500,000 words contain 150,000 unique
words
• Estimate the vocabulary size for the 1,000,000 words
corpus?
– What about for a corpus of 1,000,000,000 words?
 Text Operations
• Not all words in a document are equally significant to
represent the contents/meanings of a document
– Some word carry more meaning than others
– Noun words are the most representative of a document content
• Therefore, need to preprocess the text of a document in a
collection to be used as index terms
• Using the set of all words in a collection to index documents
creates too much noise for the retrieval task
– Reduce noise means reduce words which can be used to refer
to the document
• Text operation is the task of preprocessing text documents to
control the size of the vocabulary or the number of distinct
words used as index terms
– Preprocessing will lead to an improvement in the information
retrieval performance
• However, some search engines on the Web omit preprocessing
– Every word in the document is an index term
 Text Operations
• Text operations is the process of text transformations in
to logical representations.
• 5 main operations for selecting index terms, i.e. to
choose words/stems (or groups of words) to be used as
indexing terms:
– Lexical analysis/Tokenization of the text: generate a set or
words from text collection
– Elimination of stop words: filter out words which are not useful
in the retrieval process
– Stemming words: remove affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and
group together word variants with similar meaning
– Construction of term categorization structures such as
thesaurus, to capture relationship among words for allowing
the expansion of the original query with related terms
 Lexical Analysis/Tokenization of Text
• Tokenization is one of the step used to convert text of the
documents into a sequence of words, w 1, w2, … wn to be
adopted as index terms.
– It is the process of demarcating and possibly classifying
sections of a string of input characters into words.
– For example,
• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

• Objective of tokenization is identifying words in the text

– What is a word means?
• Is that a sequence of characters, numbers and alpha-
numeric once?
– How we identify a set of words that exist in a text documents?
• Tokenization Issues
– numbers, hyphens, punctuations marks, apostrophes …
 Issues in Tokenization
• Two words may be connected by hyphens.
–Can two words connected by hyphens and punctuation marks
taken as one word or two words? Break up hyphenated
sequence as two tokens?
• In most cases hyphen – break up the words (e.g. state-of-the-art
 state of the art), but some words, e.g. MS-DOS, B-49 - unique
words which require hyphens
• Two words may be connected by punctuation marks .
–remove totally punctuation marks unless significant, e.g.
program code: x.exe and xexe
• Two words may be separated by space.
– E.g. Addis Ababa, San Francisco, Los Angeles
• Two words may be written in different ways
–lowercase, lower-case, lower case ?
–data base, database, data-base?
 Issues in Tokenization
• Numbers: Are numbers/digits words & used as index
terms?
– dates (3/12/91 vs. Mar. 12, 1991);
– phone numbers (+251923415005)
– IP addresses (100.2.86.144)
– Generally, don’t index numbers as text most numbers are not
good index terms (like 1910, 1999)
• What about case of letters (e.g. Data or data or DATA):
– cases are not important and there is a need to convert all to upper or
lower. Which one is mostly followed by human beings?
• Simplest approach is to ignore all numbers & punctuations
and use only case-insensitive unbroken strings of
alphabetic characters as tokens.
• Issues of tokenization are language specific
– Requires the language to be known
 Tokenization
• Analyze text into a sequence of discrete tokens (words).
• Input: “Friends, Romans and Countrymen”
• Output: Tokens (an instance of a sequence of characters that
are grouped together as a useful semantic unit for processing)
– Friends
– Romans
– and
– Countrymen
• Each such token is now a candidate for an index entry,
after further processing
• But what are valid tokens to emit as index terms?
 Exercise: Tokenization
• The cat slept peacefully in the living room. It’s
a very old cat.

• The instructor (Dr. O’Neill) thinks that the

boys’ stories about Chile’s capital aren’t
amusing.
 Elimination of Stop words
• Stop words are extremely common words across document
collections that have no discriminatory power
– They may occur in 80% of the documents in a collection.
• Stop words have little semantic content; It is typical to
remove such high-frequency words
– They would appear to be of little value in helping select
documents matching a user need and needs to be filtered out
as potential index terms
• Examples of stop words are articles, prepositions,
conjunctions, etc.:
– articles (a, an, the); pronouns: (I, he, she, it, their, his)
– Some prepositions (on, of, in, about, besides, against),
conjunctions/ connectors (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet), verbs
(is, are, was, were), adverbs (here, there, out, because, soon,
after) and adjectives (all, any, each, every, few, many, some)
can also be treated as stop words
 Stop words
• Stop word elimination used to be standard in older IR
systems.
• But the trend is away from doing this. Most web search
engines index stop words:
– Good query optimization techniques mean you pay little at query
time for including stop words.
– You need stop words for:
• Phrase queries: “King of Denmark”
• Various song titles, etc.: “Let it be”, “To be or not to be”
• “Relational” queries: “flights to London”
– Elimination of stop words might reduce recall (e.g. “To be or not
to be” – all eliminated except “be” – no or irrelevant retrieval)
 Normalization
• It is canonicalizing tokens so that matches occur
despite superficial differences in the character
sequences of the tokens
– Need to “normalize” terms in indexed text as well as query
terms into the same form
– Example: We want to match U.S.A. and USA, by deleting
periods in a term
• Case Folding: Often best to lower case everything,
since users will use lowercase regardless of ‘correct’
capitalization…
– Republican vs. republican
– Fasil vs. fasil vs. FASIL
– Anti-discriminatory vs. antidiscriminatory
– Car vs. automobile?
 Stemming/Morphological analysis
• Stemming reduces tokens to their “root” form of words
to recognize morphological variation .
– The process involves removal of affixes (i.e. prefixes and suffixes)
with the aim of reducing variants to the same stem
• Often stemming removes inflectional and derivational
morphology of a word
– Inflectional morphology: vary the form of words in order to
express grammatical features, such as singular/plural or
past/present tense. E.g. Boy → boys, cut → cutting.
– Derivational morphology: makes new words from old ones. E.g.
creation is formed from create , but they are two separate words.
And also, destruction → destroy
• Stemming is language dependent
–Correct stemming is language specific and can be complex.
for example compressed and for example compress and
compression are both accepted. compress are both accept
 Stemming
• The final output from a conflation algorithm is a set of classes,
one for each stem detected.
–A Stem: the portion of a word which is left after the removal of its
affixes (i.e., prefixes and/or suffixes).
–Example: ‘connect’ is the stem for {connected, connecting
connection, connections}
–Thus, [automate, automatic, automation] all reduce to 
automat
• A class name is assigned to a document if and only if one of its
members occurs as a significant word in the text of the
document.
–A document representative then becomes a list of class names,
which are often referred as the documents index terms/keywords.
• Queries : Queries are handled in the same way.
 Ways to implement stemming
There are basically two ways to implement stemming.
–The first approach is to create a big dictionary that maps words
to their stems.
• The advantage of this approach is that it works perfectly (insofar
as the stem of a word can be defined perfectly); the
disadvantages are the space required by the dictionary and the
investment required to maintain the dictionary as new words
appear.
–The second approach is to use a set of rules that extract stems
from words.
• The advantages of this approach are that the code is typically
small, and it can gracefully handle new words; the disadvantage is
that it occasionally makes mistakes.
• But, since stemming is imperfectly defined, anyway, occasional
mistakes are tolerable, and the rule-based approach is the one
 Porter Stemmer
• Stemming is the operation of stripping the suffices from a word,
leaving its stem.
– Google, for instance, uses stemming to search for web pages containing
the words connected, connecting, connection and connections when
users ask for a web page that contains the word connect.
• In 1979, Martin Porter developed a stemming algorithm that
uses a set of rules to extract stems from words, and though it
makes some mistakes, most common words seem to work out
right.
– Porter describes his algorithm and provides a reference implementation
in C at http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/index.html
 Porter stemmer
• Most common algorithm for stemming English words to
their common grammatical root
• It is simple procedure for removing known affixes in
English without using a dictionary. To gets rid of plurals
the following rules are used:
– SSES  SS caresses  caress
– IES  i ponies  poni
– SS  SS caress → caress
–S cats  cat
– EMENT   (Delete final ement if what remains is longer than
1 character )
replacement  replac
cement  cement
 Porter stemmer
• While step 1a gets rid of plurals, step 1b removes -ed or -
ing.
– e.g.
;; agreed -> agree ;; disabled -> disable
;; matting -> mat ;; mating -> mate
;; meeting -> meet ;; milling -> mill
;; messing -> mess ;; meetings -> meet
 Stemming: challenges
• May produce unusual stems that are not English
words:
– Removing ‘UAL’ from FACTUAL and EQUAL

• May conflate (reduce to the same token) words

that are actually distinct.
• “computer”, “computational”, “computation” all
reduced to same token “comput”

• Not recognize all morphological derivations.

 Thesauri
• Mostly full-text searching cannot be accurate, since different
authors may select different words to represent the same concept
– Problem: The same meaning can be expressed using different
terms that are synonyms, homonyms and related terms
– How can it be achieved such that for the same meaning the
identical terms are used in the index and the query?
• Thesaurus: The vocabulary of a controlled indexing language,
formally organized so that a priori relationships between
concepts (for example as "broader" and “related") are made
explicit.
• A thesaurus contains terms and relationships between terms
– IR thesauri rely typically upon the use of symbols such as
USE/UF (UF=used for), BT, and RT to demonstrate inter-term
relationships.
– e.g., car = automobile, truck, bus, taxi, motor vehicle
-color = colour, paint
 Aim of Thesaurus
• Thesaurus tries to control the use of the vocabulary by showing a
set of related words to handle synonyms and homonyms
• The aim of thesaurus is therefore:
– to provide a standard vocabulary for indexing and searching
• Thesaurus rewrite to form equivalence classes, and we index such
equivalences
• When the document contains automobile, index it under car as well
(usually, also vice-versa)
– to assist users with locating terms for proper query formulation:
When the query contains automobile, look under car as well for
expanding query
– to provide classified hierarchies that allow the broadening and
narrowing of the current request according to user needs
 Thesaurus Construction
Example: thesaurus built to assist IR for searching
cars and vehicles :
Term: Motor vehicles
UF : Automobiles
Cars
Trucks
BT: Vehicles
RT: Road Engineering
Road Transport
 More Example
Example: thesaurus built to assist IR in the fields of
computer science:
TERM: natural languages
– UF natural language processing (UF=used for NLP)
– BT languages (BT=broader term is languages)
– RT artificial intelligence (RT=related term/s)
computational linguistic
formal languages
query languages
speech recognition
 Language-specificity
• Many of the above features embody
transformations that are
– Language-specific and
– Often, application-specific

• These are “plug-in” addenda to the indexing

process
• Both open source and commercial plug-ins are
available for handling these
 Index Term Selection
• Index language is the language used to describe
documents and requests
• Elements of the index language are index terms which
may be derived from the text of the document to be
described, or may be arrived at independently.
– If a full text representation of the text is adopted, then all
words in the text are used as index terms = full text
indexing
– Otherwise, need to select content-bearing words to be
used as index terms for reducing the size of the index file
which is basic to design an efficient searching IR system