Distributed Information Retrieval using Keyword Auctions

This report motivates the need for large-scale distributed approaches to information retrieval, and proposes solutions based on keyword auctions

The State-of-the-arts in Focused Search

The continuous influx of various text data on the Web requires search engines to improve their retrieval abilities for more specific information. The need for relevant results to a user’s topic of interest has gone beyond search for domain or type specific documents to more focused result (e.g. document fragments or answers to a query). The introduction of XML provides a format standard for data representation, storage, and exchange. It helps focused search to be carried out at different granularities of a structured document with XML markups. This report aims at reviewing the state-of-the-arts in focused search, particularly techniques for topic-specific document retrieval, passage retrieval, XML retrieval, and entity ranking. It is concluded with highlight of open problems

Queensland University of Technology at TREC 2005

The Information Retrieval and Web Intelligence (IR-WI) research group is a research team at the Faculty of Information Technology, QUT, Brisbane, Australia. The IR-WI group participated in the Terabyte and Robust track at TREC 2005, both for the first time. For the Robust track we applied our existing information retrieval system that was originally designed for use with structured (XML) retrieval to the domain of document retrieval. For the Terabyte track we experimented with an open source IR system, Zettair and performed two types of experiments. First, we compared Zettair’s performance on both a high-powered supercomputer and a distributed system across seven midrange personal computers. Second, we compared Zettair’s performance when a standard TREC title is used, compared with a natural language query, and a query expanded with synonyms. We compare the systems both in terms of efficiency and retrieval performance. Our results indicate that the distributed system is faster than the supercomputer, while slightly decreasing retrieval performance, and that natural language queries also slightly decrease retrieval performance, while our query expansion technique significantly decreased performance

On the Use of XML in Medical Imaging Web-Based Applications

The rapid growth of digital technology in medical fields over recent years has increased the need for applications able to manage patient medical records, imaging data, and chart information. Web-based applications are implemented with the purpose to link digital databases, storage and transmission protocols, management of large volumes of data and security concepts, allowing the possibility to read, analyze, and even diagnose remotely from the medical center where the information was acquired. The objective of this paper is to analyze the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) language in web-based applications that aid in diagnosis or treatment of patients, considering how this protocol allows indexing and exchanging the huge amount of information associated with each medical case. The purpose of this paper is to point out the main advantages and drawbacks of the XML technology in order to provide key ideas for future web-based applicationsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval

In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science