Search of spoken documents retrieves well recognized transcripts

This paper presents a series of analyses and experiments on spoken document retrieval systems: search engines that retrieve transcripts produced by speech recognizers. Results show that transcripts that match queries well tend to be recognized more accurately than transcripts that match a query less well. This result was described in past literature, however, no study or explanation of the effect has been provided until now. This paper provides such an analysis showing a relationship between word error rate and query length. The paper expands on past research by increasing the number of recognitions systems that are tested as well as showing the effect in an operational speech retrieval system. Potential future lines of enquiry are also described

Streamlined Data Fusion: Unleashing the Power of Linear Combination with Minimal Relevance Judgments

Linear combination is a potent data fusion method in information retrieval tasks, thanks to its ability to adjust weights for diverse scenarios. However, achieving optimal weight training has traditionally required manual relevance judgments on a large percentage of documents, a labor-intensive and expensive process. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of obtaining near-optimal weights using a mere 20\%-50\% of relevant documents. Through experiments on four TREC datasets, we find that weights trained with multiple linear regression using this reduced set closely rival those obtained with TREC's official "qrels." Our findings unlock the potential for more efficient and affordable data fusion, empowering researchers and practitioners to reap its full benefits with significantly less effort.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Explainable Information Retrieval: A Survey

Explainable information retrieval is an emerging research area aiming to make transparent and trustworthy information retrieval systems. Given the increasing use of complex machine learning models in search systems, explainability is essential in building and auditing responsible information retrieval models. This survey fills a vital gap in the otherwise topically diverse literature of explainable information retrieval. It categorizes and discusses recent explainability methods developed for different application domains in information retrieval, providing a common framework and unifying perspectives. In addition, it reflects on the common concern of evaluating explanations and highlights open challenges and opportunities.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures. Under revie

Learning to Choose : automatic Selection of the Information Retrieval Parameters

International audienceIn this paper we promote a selective information retrieval process to be applied in the context of repeated queries. The method is based on a training phase in which the meta search system learns the best parameters to use on a per query basis. The training phase uses a sample of annotated documents for which document relevance is known. When an equal-query is submitted to the system, it automatically knows which parameters it should use to treat the query. This Learning to choose method is evaluated using simulated data from TREC campaigns. We show that system performance highly increases in terms of precision (MAP), speci cally for the queries that are di cult to answer, when compared to any unique system con guration applied to all the queries

Examining repetition in user search behavior

This paper describes analyses of the repeated use of search engines. It is shown that users commonly re-issue queries, either to examine search results deeply or simply to query again, often days or weeks later. Hourly and weekly periodicities in behavior are observed for both queries and clicks. Navigational queries were found to be repeated differently from others

LESIM: A Novel Lexical Similarity Measure Technique for Multimedia Information Retrieval

Metadata-based similarity measurement is far from obsolete in our days, despite research’s focus on content and context. It allows for aggregating information from textual references, measuring similarity when content is not available, traditional keyword search in search engines, merging results in meta-search engines and many more research and industry interesting activities. Existing similarity measures do not take into consideration neither the unique nature of multimedia’s metadata nor the requirements of metadata-based information retrieval of multimedia. This work proposes a customised for the commonly available author-title multimedia metadata hybrid similarity measure that is shown through experimentation to be significantly more effective than baseline measures

A multi-collection latent topic model for federated search

Collection selection is a crucial function, central to the effectiveness and efficiency of a federated information retrieval system. A variety of solutions have been proposed for collection selection adapting proven techniques used in centralised retrieval. This paper defines a new approach to collection selection that models the topical distribution in each collection. We describe an extended version of latent Dirichletallocation that uses a hierarchical hyperprior to enable the different topical distributions found in each collection to be modelled. Under the model, resources are ranked based on the topical relationship between query and collection. By modelling collections in a low dimensional topic space, we can implicitly smooth their term-based characterisation with appropriate terms from topically related samples, thereby dealing with the problem of missing vocabulary within the samples. An important advantage of adopting this hierarchical model over current approaches is that the model generalises well to unseen documents given small samples of each collection. The latent structure of each collection can therefore be estimated well despite imperfect information for each collection such as sampled documents obtained through query-based sampling. Experiments demonstrate that this new, fully integrated topical model is more robust than current state of the art collection selection algorithm

Two-Step Active Learning for Instance Segmentation with Uncertainty and Diversity Sampling

Training high-quality instance segmentation models requires an abundance of labeled images with instance masks and classifications, which is often expensive to procure. Active learning addresses this challenge by striving for optimum performance with minimal labeling cost by selecting the most informative and representative images for labeling. Despite its potential, active learning has been less explored in instance segmentation compared to other tasks like image classification, which require less labeling. In this study, we propose a post-hoc active learning algorithm that integrates uncertainty-based sampling with diversity-based sampling. Our proposed algorithm is not only simple and easy to implement, but it also delivers superior performance on various datasets. Its practical application is demonstrated on a real-world overhead imagery dataset, where it increases the labeling efficiency fivefold.Comment: UNCV ICCV 202

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction