54,824 research outputs found
Selective Query Processing: a Risk-Sensitive Selection of System Configurations
In information retrieval systems, search parameters are optimized to ensure
high effectiveness based on a set of past searches and these optimized
parameters are then used as the system configuration for all subsequent
queries. A better approach, however, would be to adapt the parameters to fit
the query at hand. Selective query expansion is one such an approach, in which
the system decides automatically whether or not to expand the query, resulting
in two possible system configurations. This approach was extended recently to
include many other parameters, leading to many possible system configurations
where the system automatically selects the best configuration on a per-query
basis. To determine the ideal configurations to use on a per-query basis in
real-world systems we developed a method in which a restricted number of
possible configurations is pre-selected and then used in a meta-search engine
that decides the best search configuration on a per query basis. We define a
risk-sensitive approach for configuration pre-selection that considers the
risk-reward trade-off between the number of configurations kept, and system
effectiveness. For final configuration selection, the decision is based on
query feature similarities. We find that a relatively small number of
configurations (20) selected by our risk-sensitive model is sufficient to
increase effectiveness by about 15% according(P@10, nDCG@10) when compared to
traditional grid search using a single configuration and by about 20% when
compared to learning to rank documents. Our risk-sensitive approach works for
both diversity- and ad hoc-oriented searches. Moreover, the similarity-based
selection method outperforms the more sophisticated approaches. Thus, we
demonstrate the feasibility of developing per-query information retrieval
systems, which will guide future research in this direction.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables; submitted to TOIS ACM journa
Investigating Retrieval Method Selection with Axiomatic Features
We consider algorithm selection in the context of ad-hoc information retrieval. Given a query and a pair of retrieval methods, we propose a meta-learner that predicts how to combine the methods' relevance scores into an overall relevance score. Inspired by neural models' different properties with regard to IR axioms, these predictions are based on features that quantify axiom-related properties of the query and its top ranked documents. We conduct an evaluation on TREC Web Track data and find that the meta-learner often significantly improves over the individual methods. Finally, we conduct feature and query weight analyses to investigate the meta-learner's behavior
A Reinforcement Learning-driven Translation Model for Search-Oriented Conversational Systems
Search-oriented conversational systems rely on information needs expressed in
natural language (NL). We focus here on the understanding of NL expressions for
building keyword-based queries. We propose a reinforcement-learning-driven
translation model framework able to 1) learn the translation from NL
expressions to queries in a supervised way, and, 2) to overcome the lack of
large-scale dataset by framing the translation model as a word selection
approach and injecting relevance feedback in the learning process. Experiments
are carried out on two TREC datasets and outline the effectiveness of our
approach.Comment: This is the author's pre-print version of the work. It is posted here
for your personal use, not for redistribution. Please cite the definitive
version which will be published in Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop
SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI -
ISBN: 978-1-948087-75-
Thesaurus-assisted search term selection and query expansion: a review of user-centred studies
This paper provides a review of the literature related to the application of domain-specific thesauri in the search and retrieval process. Focusing on studies which adopt a user-centred approach, the review presents a survey of the methodologies and results from empirical studies undertaken on the use of thesauri as sources of term selection for query formulation and expansion during the search process. It summaries the ways in which domain-specific thesauri from different disciplines have been used by various types of users and how these tools aid users in the selection of search terms. The review consists of two main sections covering, firstly studies on thesaurus-aided search term selection and secondly those dealing with query expansion using thesauri. Both sections are illustrated with case studies that have adopted a user-centred approach
Table Search Using a Deep Contextualized Language Model
Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved
impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks.
Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora,
pretrained models can capture complex syntactic word relations. In this paper,
we use the deep contextualized language model BERT for the task of ad hoc table
retrieval. We investigate how to encode table content considering the table
structure and input length limit of BERT. We also propose an approach that
incorporates features from prior literature on table retrieval and jointly
trains them with BERT. In experiments on public datasets, we show that our best
approach can outperform the previous state-of-the-art method and BERT baselines
with a large margin under different evaluation metrics.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (Long
An adaptive technique for content-based image retrieval
We discuss an adaptive approach towards Content-Based Image Retrieval. It is based on the Ostensive Model of developing information needsâa special kind of relevance feedback model that learns from implicit user feedback and adds a temporal notion to relevance. The ostensive approach supports content-assisted browsing through visualising the interaction by adding user-selected images to a browsing path, which ends with a set of system recommendations. The suggestions are based on an adaptive query learning scheme, in which the query is learnt from previously selected images. Our approach is an adaptation of the original Ostensive Model based on textual features only, to include content-based features to characterise images. In the proposed scheme textual and colour features are combined using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combination. Results from a user-centred, work-task oriented evaluation show that the ostensive interface is preferred over a traditional interface with manual query facilities. This is due to its ability to adapt to the user's need, its intuitiveness and the fluid way in which it operates. Studying and comparing the nature of the underlying information need, it emerges that our approach elicits changes in the user's need based on the interaction, and is successful in adapting the retrieval to match the changes. In addition, a preliminary study of the retrieval performance of the ostensive relevance feedback scheme shows that it can outperform a standard relevance feedback strategy in terms of image recall in category search
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