Parsing¶
A forward index is a data structure that stores the term identifiers associated to every document. Conversely, an inverted index stores for each unique term the document identifiers where it appears (usually, associated to a numeric value used for ranking purposes such as the raw frequency of the term within the document).
The objective of the parsing process is to represent a given collection as a forward index. To parse a collection, use the parse_collection
command:
parse_collection - parse collection and store as forward index.
Usage: ./bin/parse_collection [OPTIONS]
Options:
-h,--help Print this help message and exit
-o,--output TEXT REQUIRED Forward index filename
-j,--threads UINT Thread count
-b,--batch-size INT=100000 Number of documents to process in one thread
-f,--format TEXT=plaintext Input format
--stemmer TEXT Stemmer type
--content-parser TEXT Content parser type
--debug Print debug messages
Subcommands:
merge Merge previously produced batch files.
When parsing process was killed during merging, use this
command to finish merging without having to restart building batches.
For example:
$ mkdir -p path/to/forward
$ zcat ClueWeb09B/*/*.warc.gz | # pass unzipped stream in WARC format
parse_collection \
-j 8 # use up to 8 threads at a time
-b 10000 # one thread builds up to 10k documents in memory
-f warc # use WARC
--stemmer porter2 # stem every term using the Porter2 algorithm
--content-parser html # parse HTML content before extracting tokens
-o path/to/forward/cw09b
In case you get the error -bash: /bin/zcat: Argument list too long
, you can pass the unzipped stream using:
$ find ClueWeb09B -name '*.warc.gz' -exec zcat -q {} \;
The parsing process will write the following files:
cw09b
: forward index in binary format.cw09b.terms
: a new-line-delimited list of sorted terms, where term having ID N is on line N, with N starting from 0.cw09b.termlex
: a binary representation of the.terms
file that is used to look up term identifiers at query time.cw09b.documents
: a new-line-delimited list of document titles (e.g., TREC-IDs), where document having ID N is on line N, with N starting from 0.cw09b.doclex
: a binary representation of the.documents
file that is used to look up document identifiers at query time.cw09b.urls
: a new-line-delimited list of URLs, where URL having ID N is on line N, with N starting from 0. Also, keep in mind that each ID corresponds with an ID of thecw09b.documents
file.
Generating mapping files¶
Once the forward index has been generated, a binary document map and lexicon file will be automatically built.
However, they can also be built using the lexicon
utility by providing the new-line delimited file as input.
The lexicon
utility also allows efficient look-ups and dumping of these binary mapping files.
Examples of the lexicon
command are shown below:
Build, print, or query lexicon
Usage: ./bin/lexicon [OPTIONS] SUBCOMMAND
Options:
-h,--help Print this help message and exit
Subcommands:
build Build a lexicon
lookup Retrieve the payload at index
rlookup Retrieve the index of payload
print Print elements line by line
For example, assume we have the following plaintext, new-line delimited file, example.terms
:
aaa
bbb
def
zzz
We can generate a lexicon as follows: ./bin/lexicon build example.terms example.lex
You can dump the binary lexicon back to a plaintext representation: ./bin/lexicon print example.lex
which should output:
aaa
bbb
def
zzz
You can retrieve the term with a given identifier: ./bin/lexicon lookup example.lex 2
which outputs def
Finally, you can retrieve the id of a given term: ./bin/lexicon rlookup example.lex def
which outputs 2
. NOTE: This requires the initial file to be lexicographically sorted, as rlookup
depends on binary search.
Supported stemmers¶
- Porter2
- Krovetz
Supported formats¶
plaintext
: every line contains the document’s title first, then any number of .. code-block:: guesswhitespaces, followed by the content delimited by a new line character.
trectext
: TREC newswire collections.trecweb
: TREC web collections.warc: Web ARChive format as defined in [the format specification](https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.0/).
wapo
: TREC Washington Post Corpus.
In case you want to parse a set of files where each one is a document (for example, the collection
wiki-large), use the files2trec.py
script
to format it to TREC (take into account that each relative file path is used as the document ID).
Once the file is generated, parse it with the parse_collection
command specifying the trectext
value for the --format
option.