Enhanced web log based recommendation by personalized retrieval

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.With the rapid development of the Internet and WWW, it is more and more important for people to access quality web information. Thus the problem of enabling users to quickly and accurately find information has become an urgent issue. As one of the basic ways to solve this problem, personalized information services have been focusing on fulfilling the personalized information requirements of different users based on their actual demands, preference characteristics, behaviour patterns, etc. This thesis focuses on enhancing web log based recommendation by personalized retrieval, and its main works and innovations include: • For personalized retrieval, the thesis proposes two models to improve user experience and optimize search performance. The first is a query suggestion model based on query semantics and click-through data. This model calculates the subject relevance between queries, and then combines the semantic information and the relevance of the query-click matrix model as this can effectively eliminate the ambiguity and input errors of reminder queries. The second is a collaborative filtering retrieval model based on local and global features. By the integration of the local and global characteristics of the accessed information, this model overcomes the limitations of a single feature, and increases the degree of application of the retrieval model. • For recommendation by personalized retrieval, we propose two recommendation models based on the web log. The first is based on the user’s atomic retrieval transaction sequence and the browse characteristics. This model decomposes search transactions, and calculates the user’s degree of interest on the search term, which allows users to query information more clearly. Further, it incorporates the user feedback on the search results evaluation value, which overcomes the shortcomings of the model based on content filtering. The second model is based on user interests association findings, which can be used to: find the relationship between resources accessed by users, extract the associations of user interests, and address the problem of user interests isolation

The Phyre2 web portal for protein modeling, prediction and analysis

Phyre2 is a suite of tools available on the web to predict and analyze protein structure, function and mutations. The focus of Phyre2 is to provide biologists with a simple and intuitive interface to state-of-the-art protein bioinformatics tools. Phyre2 replaces Phyre, the original version of the server for which we previously published a paper in Nature Protocols. In this updated protocol, we describe Phyre2, which uses advanced remote homology detection methods to build 3D models, predict ligand binding sites and analyze the effect of amino acid variants (e.g., nonsynonymous SNPs (nsSNPs)) for a user's protein sequence. Users are guided through results by a simple interface at a level of detail they determine. This protocol will guide users from submitting a protein sequence to interpreting the secondary and tertiary structure of their models, their domain composition and model quality. A range of additional available tools is described to find a protein structure in a genome, to submit large number of sequences at once and to automatically run weekly searches for proteins that are difficult to model. The server is available at http://www.sbg.bio.ic.ac.uk/phyre2. A typical structure prediction will be returned between 30 min and 2 h after submission

Neural Networks for Information Retrieval

Machine learning plays a role in many aspects of modern IR systems, and deep learning is applied in all of them. The fast pace of modern-day research has given rise to many different approaches for many different IR problems. The amount of information available can be overwhelming both for junior students and for experienced researchers looking for new research topics and directions. Additionally, it is interesting to see what key insights into IR problems the new technologies are able to give us. The aim of this full-day tutorial is to give a clear overview of current tried-and-trusted neural methods in IR and how they benefit IR research. It covers key architectures, as well as the most promising future directions.Comment: Overview of full-day tutorial at SIGIR 201

Query Chains: Learning to Rank from Implicit Feedback

This paper presents a novel approach for using clickthrough data to learn ranked retrieval functions for web search results. We observe that users searching the web often perform a sequence, or chain, of queries with a similar information need. Using query chains, we generate new types of preference judgments from search engine logs, thus taking advantage of user intelligence in reformulating queries. To validate our method we perform a controlled user study comparing generated preference judgments to explicit relevance judgments. We also implemented a real-world search engine to test our approach, using a modified ranking SVM to learn an improved ranking function from preference data. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in the ranking given by the search engine. The learned rankings outperform both a static ranking function, as well as one trained without considering query chains.Comment: 10 page