Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Rank-aware, Approximate Query Processing on the Semantic Web

Search over the Semantic Web corpus frequently leads to queries having large result sets. So, in order to discover relevant data elements, users must rely on ranking techniques to sort results according to their relevance. At the same time, applications oftentimes deal with information needs, which do not require complete and exact results. In this thesis, we face the problem of how to process queries over Web data in an approximate and rank-aware fashion

Learning To Scale Up Search-Driven Data Integration

A recent movement to tackle the long-standing data integration problem is a compositional and iterative approach, termed “pay-as-you-go” data integration. Under this model, the objective is to immediately support queries over “partly integrated” data, and to enable the user community to drive integration of the data that relate to their actual information needs. Over time, data will be gradually integrated. While the pay-as-you-go vision has been well-articulated for some time, only recently have we begun to understand how it can be manifested into a system implementation. One branch of this effort has focused on enabling queries through keyword search-driven data integration, in which users pose queries over partly integrated data encoded as a graph, receive ranked answers generated from data and metadata that is linked at query-time, and provide feedback on those answers. From this user feedback, the system learns to repair bad schema matches or record links. Many real world issues of uncertainty and diversity in search-driven integration remain open. Such tasks in search-driven integration require a combination of human guidance and machine learning. The challenge is how to make maximal use of limited human input. This thesis develops three methods to scale up search-driven integration, through learning from expert feedback: (1) active learning techniques to repair links from small amounts of user feedback; (2) collaborative learning techniques to combine users’ conflicting feedback; and (3) debugging techniques to identify where data experts could best improve integration quality. We implement these methods within the Q System, a prototype of search-driven integration, and validate their effectiveness over real-world datasets

An Approach for Intention-Driven, Dialogue-Based Web Search

Web search engines facilitate the achievement of Web-mediated tasks, including information retrieval, Web page navigation, and online transactions. These tasks often involve goals that pertain to multiple topics, or domains. Current search engines are not suitable for satisfying complex, multi-domain needs due to their lack of interactivity and knowledge. This thesis presents a novel intention-driven, dialogue-based Web search approach that uncovers and combines users\u27 multi-domain goals to provide helpful virtual assistance. The intention discovery procedure uses a hierarchy of Partially Observable Markov Decision Process-based dialogue managers and a backing knowledge base to systematically explore the dialogue\u27s information space, probabilistically refining the perception of user goals. The search approach has been implemented in IDS, a search engine for online gift shopping. A usability study comparing IDS-based searching with Google-based searching found that the IDS-based approach takes significantly less time and effort, and results in higher user confidence in the retrieved results

Un environnement de spécification et de découverte pour la réutilisation des composants logiciels dans le développement des logiciels distribués

Notre travail vise à élaborer une solution efficace pour la découverte et la réutilisation des composants logiciels dans les environnements de développement existants et couramment utilisés. Nous proposons une ontologie pour décrire et découvrir des composants logiciels élémentaires. La description couvre à la fois les propriétés fonctionnelles et les propriétés non fonctionnelles des composants logiciels exprimées comme des paramètres de QoS. Notre processus de recherche est basé sur la fonction qui calcule la distance sémantique entre la signature d'un composant et la signature d'une requête donnée, réalisant ainsi une comparaison judicieuse. Nous employons également la notion de " subsumption " pour comparer l'entrée-sortie de la requête et des composants. Après sélection des composants adéquats, les propriétés non fonctionnelles sont employées comme un facteur distinctif pour raffiner le résultat de publication des composants résultats. Nous proposons une approche de découverte des composants composite si aucun composant élémentaire n'est trouvé, cette approche basée sur l'ontologie commune. Pour intégrer le composant résultat dans le projet en cours de développement, nous avons développé l'ontologie d'intégration et les deux services " input/output convertor " et " output Matching ".Our work aims to develop an effective solution for the discovery and the reuse of software components in existing and commonly used development environments. We propose an ontology for describing and discovering atomic software components. The description covers both the functional and non functional properties which are expressed as QoS parameters. Our search process is based on the function that calculates the semantic distance between the component interface signature and the signature of a given query, thus achieving an appropriate comparison. We also use the notion of "subsumption" to compare the input/output of the query and the components input/output. After selecting the appropriate components, the non-functional properties are used to refine the search result. We propose an approach for discovering composite components if any atomic component is found, this approach based on the shared ontology. To integrate the component results in the project under development, we developed the ontology integration and two services " input/output convertor " and " output Matching "

Utilizing Knowledge Bases In Information Retrieval For Clinical Decision Support And Precision Medicine

Accurately answering queries that describe a clinical case and aim at finding articles in a collection of medical literature requires utilizing knowledge bases in capturing many explicit and latent aspects of such queries. Proper representation of these aspects needs knowledge-based query understanding methods that identify the most important query concepts as well as knowledge-based query reformulation methods that add new concepts to a query. In the tasks of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and Precision Medicine (PM), the query and collection documents may have a complex structure with different components, such as disease and genetic variants that should be transformed to enable an effective information retrieval. In this work, we propose methods for representing domain-specific queries based on weighted concepts of different types whether exist in the query itself or extracted from the knowledge bases and top retrieved documents. Besides, we propose an optimization framework, which allows unifying query analysis and expansion by jointly determining the importance weights for the query and expansion concepts depending on their type and source. We also propose a probabilistic model to reformulate the query given genetic information in the query and collection documents. We observe significant improvement of retrieval accuracy will be obtained for our proposed methods over state-of-the-art baselines for the tasks of clinical decision support and precision medicine