Introduction to Telecom
Technologies (Telecom)
Getachew Mamo
Department of Information Technology
College of Engineering and Technology
Jimma University
E. Mail, jissolution@yahoo.com

1
 Chapter 1:
Understanding the Telecommunications
Revolution

2
 Outline
 Introduction
 Changes in Telecommunications

3
Introduction

4
 What is Telecommunications?
• The word telecommunications has its roots in
Greek:
– tele means "over a distance," and
– communicara means "the ability to share."

• Hence,
– telecommunications literally means "the sharing of
information over a distance."

5
 TR vs. Database Retrieval
• Information
– Unstructured/free text vs. structured data
– Ambiguous vs. well-defined semantics

• Query
– Ambiguous vs. well-defined semantics
– Incomplete vs. complete specification

• Answers
– Relevant documents vs. matched records

• TR is an empirically defined problem!

6
 TR is Hard!
• Under/over-specified query
– Ambiguous: “buying CDs” (money or music?)
– Incomplete: what kind of CDs?
– What if “CD” is never mentioned in document?

• Vague semantics of documents

– Ambiguity: e.g., word-sense, structural
– Incomplete: Inferences required

• Even hard for people!

– 80% agreement in human judgments

7
 TR is “Easy”!
• TR CAN be easy in a particular case
– Ambiguity in query/document is RELATIVE to the
database
– So, if the query is SPECIFIC enough, just one keyword
may get all the relevant documents

• PERCEIVED TR performance is usually better than

the actual performance
– Users can NOT judge the completeness of an answer

8
 History of TR on One Slide
• Birth of TR
– 1945: V. Bush’s article “As we may think”
– 1957: H. P. Luhn’s idea of word counting and matching

• Indexing & Evaluation Methodology (1960’s)

– Smart system (G. Salton’s group)
– Cranfield test collection (C. Cleverdon’s group)
– Indexing: automatic can be as good as manual (controlled vocabulary)

• TR Models (1970’s & 1980’s) …

• Large-scale Evaluation & Applications (1990’s-Present)
– TREC (D. Harman & E. Voorhees, NIST)
– Web search, PubMed, …
– Boundary with related areas are disappearing

9
 Short vs. Long Term Info Need
• Short-term information need (Ad hoc retrieval)
– “Temporary need”, e.g., info about used cars
– Information source is relatively static
– User “pulls” information
– Application example: library search, Web search

• Long-term information need (Filtering)

– “Stable need”, e.g., new data mining algorithms
– Information source is dynamic
– System “pushes” information to user
– Applications: news filter

10
 Importance of Ad hoc Retrieval
• Directly manages any existing large collection of
information
• There are many many “ad hoc” information needs
• A long-term information need can be satisfied
through frequent ad hoc retrieval
• Basic techniques of ad hoc retrieval can be used for
filtering and other “non-retrieval” tasks, such as
automatic summarization.

11
 Formal Formulation of TR
• Vocabulary V={w , w , …, w } of language
1 2 N

• Query q = q ,…,q where q  V

1 m, i

• Document d = d ,…,d where d  V

i i1 imi, ij

• Collection C= {d , …, d }
1 k

• Set of relevant documents R(q)  C

– Generally unknown and user-dependent
– Query is a “hint” on which doc is in R(q)

• Task = compute R’(q), an “approximate R(q)”

12
 Computing R(q)
• Strategy 1: Document selection
– R(q)={dC|f(d,q)=1}, where f(d,q) {0,1} is an indicator
function or classifier
– System must decide if a doc is relevant or not
(“absolute relevance”)

• Strategy 2: Document ranking

– R(q) = {dC|f(d,q)>}, where f(d,q)  is a relevance
measure function;  is a cutoff
– System must decide if one doc is more likely to be
relevant than another (“relative relevance”)

13
Document Selection vs. Ranking

+ +- - R’(q)
1
True R(q) + ++
Doc Selection
f(d,q)=?
- -- - - -
+ +- - + - - 0 -
+ - + - -
+ -
- -
-- - -
- - 0.98 d1 +
- - Doc Ranking 0.95 d2 +
R’(q)
f(d,q)=? 0.83 d3 -
0.80 d4 +
0.76 d5 -
0.56 d6 -
0.34 d7 -
0.21 d8 +
0.21 d9 - 14
 Problems of Doc Selection
• The classifier is unlikely accurate
– “Over-constrained” query (terms are too specific): no
relevant documents found
– “Under-constrained” query (terms are too general):
over delivery
– It is extremely hard to find the right position between
these two extremes

• Even if it is accurate, all relevant documents are not

equally relevant
• Relevance is a matter of degree!
15
 Ranking is often preferred
• Relevance is a matter of degree
• A user can stop browsing anywhere, so the boundary
is controlled by the user
– High recall users would view more items
– High precision users would view only a few

• Theoretical
[Robertson 77]
justification: Probability Ranking Principle

16
 Probability Ranking Principle
[Robertson 77]
• As stated by Cooper
“If a reference retrieval system’s response to each request is a ranking of the
documents in the collections in order of decreasing probability of usefulness
to the user who submitted the request, where the probabilities are estimated
as accurately a possible on the basis of whatever data made available to the
system for this purpose, then the overall effectiveness of the system to its
users will be the best that is obtainable on the basis of that data.”

• Robertson provides two formal justifications

• Assumptions: Independent relevance and sequential
browsing (not necessarily all hold in reality)

17
According to the PRP, all we need is

“A relevance measure function f”

which satisfies

For all q, d1, d2,

f(q,d1) > f(q,d2) iff p(Rel|q,d1) >p(Rel|q,d2)

Most IR research has focused on finding a good function f

18
Evaluation in Information
Retrieval

19
 Evaluation Criteria
• Effectiveness/Accuracy
– Precision, Recall

• Efficiency
– Space and time complexity

• Usability
– How useful for real user tasks?

20
 Methodology: Cranfield Tradition
• Laboratory testing of system components
– Precision, Recall
– Comparative testing

• Test collections
– Set of documents
– Set of questions
– Relevance judgments

21
 The Contingency Table
Action
Doc Retrieved Not Retrieved

Relevant Relevant Retrieved Relevant Rejected

Not relevant Irrelevant Retrieved Irrelevant Rejected

Relevant Retrieved
Precision 
Retrieved
Relevant Retrieved
Recall 
Relevant

22
 How to measure a ranking?
• Compute the precision at every recall point
• Plot a precision-recall (PR) curve

x Which is better?
precision x precision
x x

x x
x x

recall recall

23
 Summarize a Ranking: MAP
• Given that n docs are retrieved
– Compute the precision (at rank) where each (new) relevant document
is retrieved => p(1),…,p(k), if we have k rel. docs
– E.g., if the first rel. doc is at the 2nd rank, then p(1)=1/2.
– If a relevant document never gets retrieved, we assume the precision
corresponding to that rel. doc to be zero
• Compute the average over all the relevant documents
– Average precision = (p(1)+…p(k))/k
• This gives us (non-interpolated) average precision, which captures
both precision and recall and is sensitive to the rank of each relevant
document
• Mean Average Precisions (MAP)
– MAP = arithmetic mean average precision over a set of topics
– gMAP = geometric mean average precision over a set of topics (more
affected by difficult topics)

24
 Summarize a Ranking: NDCG
• What if relevance judgments are in a scale of [1,r]? r>2
• Cumulative Gain (CG) at rank n
– Let the ratings of the n documents be r1, r2, …rn (in ranked order)
– CG = r1+r2+…rn
• Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG) at rank n
– DCG = r1 + r2/log22 + r3/log23 + … rn/log2n
– We may use any base for the logarithm, e.g., base=b
– For rank positions above b, do not discount
• Normalized Cumulative Gain (NDCG) at rank n
– Normalize DCG at rank n by the DCG value at rank n of the ideal
ranking
– The ideal ranking would first return the documents with the highest
relevance level, then the next highest relevance level, etc
– Compute the precision (at rank) where each (new) relevant
document is retrieved => p(1),…,p(k), if we have k rel. docs
• NDCG is now quite popular in evaluating Web search
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When There’s only 1 Relevant Document
• Scenarios:
– known-item search
– navigational queries

• Search Length = Rank of the answer:

– measures a user’s effort

• Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR):

– Reciprocal Rank: 1/Rank-of-the-answer
– Take an average over all the queries

26
 Precion-Recall Curve
Out of 4728 rel docs,
we’ve got 3212

Recall=3212/4728

Precision@10docs
about 5.5 docs
in the top 10 docs
are relevant

Breakeven Point
(prec=recall)

Mean Avg. Precision (MAP)

D1 +
D2 + Total # rel docs = 4
D3 – System returns 6 docs
D4 – Average Prec = (1/1+2/2+3/5+0)/4
D5 + 27
D6 -
What Query Averaging Hides
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
Precision

0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1

Recall

Slide from Doug Oard’s presentation, originally from Ellen Voorhees’ presentation
28
 The Pooling Strategy
• When the test collection is very large, it’s impossible to
completely judge all the documents
• TREC’s strategy: pooling
– Appropriate for relative comparison of different systems
– Given N systems, take top-K from the result of each, combine them
to form a “pool”
– Users judge all the documents in the pool; unjudged documents
are assumed to be non-relevant
• Advantage: less human effort
• Potential problem:
– bias due to incomplete judgments (okay for relative comparison)
– Favor a system contributing to the pool, but when reused, a new
system’s performance may be under-estimated
• Reuse the data set with caution!
29
 User Studies
• Limitations of Cranfield evaluation strategy:
– How do we evaluate a technique for improving the interface of a search
engine?
– How do we evaluate the overall utility of a system?
• User studies are needed
• General user study procedure:
– Experimental systems are developed
– Subjects are recruited as users
– Variation can be in the system or the users
– Users use the system and user behavior is logged
– User information is collected (before: background, after: experience with
the system)
• Clickthrough-based real-time user studies:
– Assume clicked documents to be relevant
– Mix results from multiple methods and compare their clickthroughs

30
Common Components in a
TR System

31
Typical TR System Architecture
docs query

Feedback judgments
Tokenizer

Doc Rep (Index) Query Rep User

Indexer Scorer results

Index

32
 Text Representation/Indexing
• Making it easier to match a query with a document
• Query and document should be represented using
the same units/terms
• Controlled vocabulary vs. full text indexing
• Full-text indexing is more practically useful and has
proven to be as effective as manual indexing with
controlled vocabulary

33
 What is a good indexing term?
• Specific (phrases) or general (single word)?
• Luhn found that words with middle frequency are
most useful
– Not too specific (low utility, but still useful!)
– Not too general (lack of discrimination, stop words)
– Stop word removal is common, but rare words are kept

• All words or a (controlled) subset? When term

weighting is used, it is a matter of weighting not
selecting of indexing terms (more later)

34
 Tokenization
• Word segmentation is needed for some languages
– Is it really needed?

• Normalize lexical units: Words with similar meanings should be mapped

to the same indexing term
– Stemming: Mapping all inflectional forms of words to the same root form, e.g.
• computer -> compute
• computation -> compute
• computing -> compute (but king->k?)

– Are we losing finer-granularity discrimination?

• Stop word removal

– What is a stop word? What about a query like “to be or not to be”?

35
 Relevance Feedback
Results:
d1 3.5
Query Retrieval
d2 2.4
Engine
…
dk 0.5
Updated ...
query
User
Document
collection Judgments:
d1 +
d2 -
d3 +
Feedback …
dk -
...

36
 Pseudo/Blind/Automatic
Feedback
Results:
d1 3.5
Query Retrieval
d2 2.4
Engine
…
dk 0.5
Updated ...
query Document
collection Judgments:
d1 + top 10
d2 +
d3 +
Feedback …
dk -
...

37
 What You Should Know
• How TR is different from DB retrieval
• Why ranking is generally preferred to document selection
(justified by PRP)
• How to compute the major evaluation measure (precision,
recall, precision-recall curve, MAP, gMAP, breakeven
precision, NDCG, MRR)
• What is pooling
• What is tokenization (word segmentation, stemming, stop
word removal)
• What is relevance feedback; what is pseudo relevance
feedback

38
 Overview of Retrieval Models
Relevance

(Rep(q), Rep(d)) P(r=1|q,d) r {0,1} P(d q) or P(q d)

Similarity Probability of Relevance Probabilistic inference

Regression Generative Different

Different Model Model
rep & similarity inference system
(Fox 83)
Doc Query
… Learn to generation generation
Prob. concept Inference
Rank network
(Joachims 02) space model
Vector space Prob. distr. Classical LM (Wong & Yao, 95) model
model (Burges et al. 05) (Turtle & Croft, 91)
model prob. Model approach
(Salton et al., 75) (Wong & Yao, 89) (Robertson & (Ponte & Croft, 98)
Sparck Jones, 76) (Lafferty & Zhai, 01a)

39
Retrieval Models: Vector Space

40
 The Basic Question
Given a query, how do we know if document A
is more relevant than B?

One Possible Answer

If document A uses more query words than
document B
(Word usage in document A is more similar to
that in query)

41
 Relevance = Similarity
• Assumptions
– Query and document are represented similarly
– A query can be regarded as a “document”
– Relevance(d,q)  similarity(d,q)

• R(q) = {dC|f(d,q)>}, f(q,d)=(Rep(q), Rep(d))

• Key issues
– How to represent query/document?
– How to define the similarity measure ?

42
 Vector Space Model
• Represent a doc/query by a term vector
– Term: basic concept, e.g., word or phrase
– Each term defines one dimension
– N terms define a high-dimensional space
– Element of vector corresponds to term weight
– E.g., d=(x1,…,xN), xi is “importance” of term i

• Measure relevance by the distance between the

query vector and document vector in the vector
space

43
 VS Model: illustration

Starbucks
D9
D2 ??
??
D11

D3 D5
D10

D4 D6
Java
Query
D7
D8 D1
Microsoft
??
44
 What the VS model doesn’t say
• How to define/select the “basic concept”
– Concepts are assumed to be orthogonal

• How to assign weights

– Weight in query indicates importance of term
– Weight in doc indicates how well the term
characterizes the doc

• How to define the similarity/distance measure

45
 What’s a good “basic concept”?
• Orthogonal
– Linearly independent basis vectors
– “Non-overlapping” in meaning

• No ambiguity
• Weights can be assigned automatically and hopefully
accurately
• Many possibilities: Words, stemmed words, phrases,
“latent concept”, …

46
 How to Assign Weights?
• Very very important!
• Why weighting
– Query side: Not all terms are equally important
– Doc side: Some terms carry more information about contents

• How?
– Two basic heuristics
• TF (Term Frequency) = Within-doc-frequency
• IDF (Inverse Document Frequency)

– TF normalization

47
 TF Weighting
• Idea: A term is more important if it occurs more frequently in a
document
• Some formulas: Let f(t,d) be the frequency count of term t in
doc d
– Raw TF: TF(t,d) = f(t,d)
– Log TF: TF(t,d)=log f(t,d)
– Maximum frequency normalization: TF(t,d) = 0.5
+0.5*f(t,d)/MaxFreq(d)
– “Okapi/BM25 TF”: TF(t,d) = k
f(t,d)/(f(t,d)+k(1-b+b*doclen/avgdoclen))

• Normalization of TF is very important!

48
 TF Normalization
• Why?
– Document length variation
– “Repeated occurrences” are less informative than the
“first occurrence”

• Two views of document length

– A doc is long because it uses more words
– A doc is long because it has more contents

• Generally penalize long doc, but avoid over-

penalizing (pivoted normalization)

49
 TF Normalization (cont.)

Norm. TF

Raw TF

Which curve is more reasonable?

Should normalized-TF be up-bounded?
Normalization interacts with the similarity measure

50
 Regularized/“Pivoted”
Length Normalization

Norm. TF

Raw TF
“Pivoted normalization”: Using avg. doc length to regularize normalization

1-b+b*doclen/avgdoclen (b varies from 0 to 1)

What would happen if doclen is {>, <,=} avgdoclen?

Advantage: stabalize parameter setting

51
 IDF Weighting
• Idea: A term is more discriminative if it occurs only in
fewer documents
• Formula:
IDF(t) = 1+ log(n/k)
n – total number of docs
k -- # docs with term t (doc freq)

52
 TF-IDF Weighting
• TF-IDF weighting : weight(t,d)=TF(t,d)*IDF(t)
– Common in doc  high tf  high weight
– Rare in collection high idf high weight

• Imagine a word count profile, what kind of terms

would have high weights?

53
 How to Measure Similarity?

Di  ( w i 1 ,..., w iN )

Q  ( wq1 ,..., wqN ) w  0 if a term is absent
  N
Dot product similarity : sim(Q , Di )   wqj  w ij
j 1
N

   wqj  w ij
j 1
Cosine : sim(Q , Di ) 
N N
 ( wqj ) 2
  ( wij )2
j 1 j 1

(  normalized dot product)

  N

How about Euclidean? sim(Q, Di )   qj ij

( w
j 1
 w ) 2

54
 VS Example: Raw TF & Dot Product
information
doc1 retrieval
Sim(q,doc1)=4.8*2.4+4.5*4.5 query=“information retrieval”
search
engine
information Sim(q,doc2)=2.4*2.4

travel
information
Sim(q,doc3)=0
doc2 map
travel

info retrieval travel map search engine govern president congress

IDF(faked) 2.4 4.5 2.8 3.3 2.1 5.4 2.2 3.2 4.3
government
president doc1 2(4.8) 1(4.5) 1(2.1) 1(5.4)
doc3 congress doc2 1(2.4 ) 2 (5.6) 1(3.3)
doc3 1 (2.2) 1(3.2) 1(4.3)

…… query 1(2.4) 1(4.5)

55
What Works the Best?

•Use single words

Error
•Use stat. phrases

[ ] •Remove stop words

•Stemming
•Others(?)

(Singhal 2001)

56
 Relevance Feedback in VS
• Basic setting: Learn from examples
– Positive examples: docs known to be relevant
– Negative examples: docs known to be non-relevant
– How do you learn from this to improve performance?

• General method: Query modification

– Adding new (weighted) terms
– Adjusting weights of old terms
– Doing both

• The most well-known and effective approach is Rocchio

[Rocchio 1971]

57
Rocchio Feedback: Illustration

--- ---
- ++++ - -
-- + q q - -
- +++ + + -
- - - + +++ -
+ ++ --
- - -- --

58
 Rocchio Feedback: Formula

Parameters
New query

Origial query Rel docs Non-rel docs

59
 Rocchio in Practice
• Negative (non-relevant) examples are not very important
(why?)
• Often project the vector onto a lower dimension (i.e., consider
only a small number of words that have high weights in the
centroid vector) (efficiency concern)
• Avoid “training bias” (keep relatively high weight on the
original query weights) (why?)
• Can be used for relevance feedback and pseudo feedback
• Usually robust and effective

60
 “Extension” of VS Model
• Alternative similarity measures
– Many other choices (tend not to be very effective)
– P-norm (Extended Boolean): matching a Boolean query
with a TF-IDF document vector

• Alternative representation
– Many choices (performance varies a lot)
– Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) [TREC performance
tends to be average]

• Generalized vector space model

– Theoretically interesting, not seriously evaluated

61
 Advantages of VS Model

• Empirically effective! (Top TREC performance)

• Intuitive
• Easy to implement
• Well-studied/Most evaluated
• The Smart system
– Developed at Cornell: 1960-1999
– Still widely used

• Warning: Many variants of TF-IDF!

62
 Disadvantages of VS Model
• Assume term independence
• Assume query and document to be the same
• Lack of “predictive adequacy”
– Arbitrary term weighting
– Arbitrary similarity measure

• Lots of parameter tuning!

63
 What You Should Know
• What is Vector Space Model (a family of models)
• What is TF-IDF weighting
• What is pivoted normalization weighting
• How Rocchio works

64
 Roadmap
• This lecture
– Basic concepts of TR
– Evaluation
– Common components
– Vector space model

• Next lecture: continue overview of IR

– IR system implementation
– Other retrieval models
– Applications of basic TR techniques

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