111,017 research outputs found
Toward Entity-Aware Search
As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability
Relating Web pages to enable information-gathering tasks
We argue that relationships between Web pages are functions of the user's
intent. We identify a class of Web tasks - information-gathering - that can be
facilitated by a search engine that provides links to pages which are related
to the page the user is currently viewing. We define three kinds of intentional
relationships that correspond to whether the user is a) seeking sources of
information, b) reading pages which provide information, or c) surfing through
pages as part of an extended information-gathering process. We show that these
three relationships can be productively mined using a combination of textual
and link information and provide three scoring mechanisms that correspond to
them: {\em SeekRel}, {\em FactRel} and {\em SurfRel}. These scoring mechanisms
incorporate both textual and link information. We build a set of capacitated
subnetworks - each corresponding to a particular keyword - that mirror the
interconnection structure of the World Wide Web. The scores are computed by
computing flows on these subnetworks. The capacities of the links are derived
from the {\em hub} and {\em authority} values of the nodes they connect,
following the work of Kleinberg (1998) on assigning authority to pages in
hyperlinked environments. We evaluated our scoring mechanism by running
experiments on four data sets taken from the Web. We present user evaluations
of the relevance of the top results returned by our scoring mechanisms and
compare those to the top results returned by Google's Similar Pages feature,
and the {\em Companion} algorithm proposed by Dean and Henzinger (1999).Comment: In Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 200
Simplifying Deep-Learning-Based Model for Code Search
To accelerate software development, developers frequently search and reuse
existing code snippets from a large-scale codebase, e.g., GitHub. Over the
years, researchers proposed many information retrieval (IR) based models for
code search, which match keywords in query with code text. But they fail to
connect the semantic gap between query and code. To conquer this challenge, Gu
et al. proposed a deep-learning-based model named DeepCS. It jointly embeds
method code and natural language description into a shared vector space, where
methods related to a natural language query are retrieved according to their
vector similarities. However, DeepCS' working process is complicated and
time-consuming. To overcome this issue, we proposed a simplified model
CodeMatcher that leverages the IR technique but maintains many features in
DeepCS. Generally, CodeMatcher combines query keywords with the original order,
performs a fuzzy search on name and body strings of methods, and returned the
best-matched methods with the longer sequence of used keywords. We verified its
effectiveness on a large-scale codebase with about 41k repositories.
Experimental results showed the simplified model CodeMatcher outperforms DeepCS
by 97% in terms of MRR (a widely used accuracy measure for code search), and it
is over 66 times faster than DeepCS. Besides, comparing with the
state-of-the-art IR-based model CodeHow, CodeMatcher also improves the MRR by
73%. We also observed that: fusing the advantages of IR-based and
deep-learning-based models is promising because they compensate with each other
by nature; improving the quality of method naming helps code search, since
method name plays an important role in connecting query and code
A User-Centered Concept Mining System for Query and Document Understanding at Tencent
Concepts embody the knowledge of the world and facilitate the cognitive
processes of human beings. Mining concepts from web documents and constructing
the corresponding taxonomy are core research problems in text understanding and
support many downstream tasks such as query analysis, knowledge base
construction, recommendation, and search. However, we argue that most prior
studies extract formal and overly general concepts from Wikipedia or static web
pages, which are not representing the user perspective. In this paper, we
describe our experience of implementing and deploying ConcepT in Tencent QQ
Browser. It discovers user-centered concepts at the right granularity
conforming to user interests, by mining a large amount of user queries and
interactive search click logs. The extracted concepts have the proper
granularity, are consistent with user language styles and are dynamically
updated. We further present our techniques to tag documents with user-centered
concepts and to construct a topic-concept-instance taxonomy, which has helped
to improve search as well as news feeds recommendation in Tencent QQ Browser.
We performed extensive offline evaluation to demonstrate that our approach
could extract concepts of higher quality compared to several other existing
methods. Our system has been deployed in Tencent QQ Browser. Results from
online A/B testing involving a large number of real users suggest that the
Impression Efficiency of feeds users increased by 6.01% after incorporating the
user-centered concepts into the recommendation framework of Tencent QQ Browser.Comment: Accepted by KDD 201
Intelligent Personalized Searching
Search engine is a very useful tool for almost everyone nowadays. People use search engine for the purpose of searching about their personal finance, restaurants, electronic products, and travel information, to name a few. As helpful as search engines are in terms of providing information, they can also manipulate people behaviors because most people trust online information without a doubt. Furthermore, ordinary users usually only pay attention the highest-ranking pages from the search results. Knowing this predictable user behavior, search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo take advantage and use it as a tool for them to generate profit. Search engine providers are enterprise companies with the goal to generate profit, and an easy way for them to do so is by ranking up particular web pages to promote the product or services of their own or their paid customers. The results from search engine could be misleading. The goal of this project is to filter the bias from search results and provide best matches on behalf of users’ interest
Bridging the Semantic Gap in Multimedia Information Retrieval: Top-down and Bottom-up approaches
Semantic representation of multimedia information is vital for enabling the kind of multimedia search capabilities that professional searchers require. Manual annotation is often not possible because of the shear scale of the multimedia information that needs indexing. This paper explores the ways in which we are using both top-down, ontologically driven approaches and bottom-up, automatic-annotation approaches to provide retrieval facilities to users. We also discuss many of the current techniques that we are investigating to combine these top-down and bottom-up approaches
SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users
The purpose of data warehouses is to enable business analysts to make better
decisions. Over the years the technology has matured and data warehouses have
become extremely successful. As a consequence, more and more data has been
added to the data warehouses and their schemas have become increasingly
complex. These systems still work great in order to generate pre-canned
reports. However, with their current complexity, they tend to be a poor match
for non tech-savvy business analysts who need answers to ad-hoc queries that
were not anticipated. This paper describes the design, implementation, and
experience of the SODA system (Search over DAta Warehouse). SODA bridges the
gap between the business needs of analysts and the technical complexity of
current data warehouses. SODA enables a Google-like search experience for data
warehouses by taking keyword queries of business users and automatically
generating executable SQL. The key idea is to use a graph pattern matching
algorithm that uses the metadata model of the data warehouse. Our results with
real data from a global player in the financial services industry show that
SODA produces queries with high precision and recall, and makes it much easier
for business users to interactively explore highly-complex data warehouses.Comment: VLDB201
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