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ISR
Chapter -Three

IR Models 1
IR models

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 What is a Retrieval Model?
•A retrieval model describes the human and
computational processes involved in retrieval
• Example: A model of human information seeking
behavior
• Example: A model of how documents are ranked
computationally
• Components: Users, information needs, queries,
documents, relevance assessments, ….
• Retrieval models define relevance, explicitly or implicitly
 Boolean IR Model
one of the earliest and simplest retrieval methods
 uses exact matching to match documents to a user
"query“
 information request by finding documents that are
"relevant" in terms of matching the words in the query.
Any number of logical statements can be combined using
the three Boolean operators.
Operators: AND, OR, NOT

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 AND: Finds only documents containing all of the

specified words or phrases.

OR: Finds documents containing at least one of the

specified words or phrases.

NOT: Excludes documents containing the specified word

or phrase.
P Q Not P P And Q P Or Q
False False True False False
False True True False True
True False False False True
True True False True True 5
Advantages:

• Very efficient

• Predictable, easy to explain

• Structured queries

• Works well when searchers knows exactly what is wanted

Disadvantages:

• Most people find it difficult to create good Boolean queries

• Precision and recall usually have strong inverse correlation

• Predictability of results causes people to overestimate recall

• Documents that are “close” are not retrieved

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 Vector Space Model
 is a way of representing documents through the words
that they contain

Indexing terms are coordinates in a multidimensional

information space

Term weighting

cosine similarity measure

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• Each document is broken down into a word frequency
table.

• The tables are called vectors and can be stored as

arrays

• A vocabulary is built from all the words in all

documents in the system

• Each document is represented as a vector based

against the vocabulary

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Example Vector Space
• Document A
• “A dog and a cat.”

a dog and cat

2 1 1 1

• Document B
• “A frog.”

a frog
1 1
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Vector Example ….

• The vocabulary contains all words used

• a, dog, and, cat, frog

• The vocabulary needs to be sorted

• a, and, cat, dog, frog

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 Vector Example ….
• Document A: “A dog and a cat.”

• Vector: (2,1,1,1,0) a and cat dog frog

• Document B: “A frog.” 2 1 1 1 0

• Vector: (1,0,0,0,1) a and cat dog frog

1 0 0 0 1

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For simplicity, let’s assume three index terms: dog, bite, man
(i.e., V=3)

0 = the term does not appear 1 = the term appears at least once

Dog man bite

doc_1 1 1 1 man “dog bite man“ [1,1, 1]

“man, bite “ [0,1,
doc_2 1 0 1 1] 1
1
doc_3 0 1 1
Dog
1
1
Doc _1 “dog bite man“ [1,1, 1] bite 1 “dog bite “ [1,0, 1]
Doc _2 “dog bite“ [1,0, 1]

Doc _3 “dog bite“ [0,1, 1]

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 Probabilistic Model
The probabilistic retrieval model is based on the Probability
Ranking Principle.
The document is retrieved according to the probability of the
document being relevant to the query. Mathematically, the scoring
function is given by

• P(R = 1|d, q)

The document is termed relevant if its probability of being relevant

is greater than its probability of being non relevant
• P(R = 1|d, q) > P(R = 0|d, q)

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 Probabilistic model

Ranking based on calculation of probability, not similarity

Uses a ranking function to order retrieved documents

May use term frequency data to estimate probability

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Basic Probability priniple
Let a, b be two events.

Bayesian formulas

p(a | b) p(b)  p(a  b)  p(b | a) p(a)

p(b | a) p(a)
p ( a | b) 
p(b)
p(a | b) p(b)  p(b | a ) p(a )

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End of Chapter -Three

Questions

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