Query generation from multiple media examples

This paper exploits an unified media document representation called feature terms for query generation from multiple media examples, e.g. images. A feature term refers to a value interval of a media feature. A media document is therefore represented by a frequency vector about feature term appearance. This approach (1) facilitates feature accumulation from multiple examples; (2) enables the exploration of text-based retrieval models for multimedia retrieval. Three statistical criteria, minimised chi-squared, minimised AC/DC rate and maximised entropy, are proposed to extract feature terms from a given media document collection. Two textual ranking functions, KL divergence and a BM25-like retrieval model, are adapted to estimate media document relevance. Experiments on the Corel photo collection and the TRECVid 2006 collection show the effectiveness of feature term based query in image and video retrieval

Unsupervised Graph-based Rank Aggregation for Improved Retrieval

This paper presents a robust and comprehensive graph-based rank aggregation approach, used to combine results of isolated ranker models in retrieval tasks. The method follows an unsupervised scheme, which is independent of how the isolated ranks are formulated. Our approach is able to combine arbitrary models, defined in terms of different ranking criteria, such as those based on textual, image or hybrid content representations. We reformulate the ad-hoc retrieval problem as a document retrieval based on fusion graphs, which we propose as a new unified representation model capable of merging multiple ranks and expressing inter-relationships of retrieval results automatically. By doing so, we claim that the retrieval system can benefit from learning the manifold structure of datasets, thus leading to more effective results. Another contribution is that our graph-based aggregation formulation, unlike existing approaches, allows for encapsulating contextual information encoded from multiple ranks, which can be directly used for ranking, without further computations and post-processing steps over the graphs. Based on the graphs, a novel similarity retrieval score is formulated using an efficient computation of minimum common subgraphs. Finally, another benefit over existing approaches is the absence of hyperparameters. A comprehensive experimental evaluation was conducted considering diverse well-known public datasets, composed of textual, image, and multimodal documents. Performed experiments demonstrate that our method reaches top performance, yielding better effectiveness scores than state-of-the-art baseline methods and promoting large gains over the rankers being fused, thus demonstrating the successful capability of the proposal in representing queries based on a unified graph-based model of rank fusions

The Mirror DBMS at TREC-8

The database group at University of Twente participates in TREC8 using the Mirror DBMS, a prototype database system especially designed for multimedia and web retrieval. From a database perspective, the purpose has been to check whether we can get sufficient performance, and to prepare for the very large corpus track in which we plan to participate next year. From an IR perspective, the experiments have been designed to learn more about the effect of the global statistics on the ranking

Towards better measures: evaluation of estimated resource description quality for distributed IR

An open problem for Distributed Information Retrieval systems (DIR) is how to represent large document repositories, also known as resources, both accurately and efficiently. Obtaining resource description estimates is an important phase in DIR, especially in non-cooperative environments. Measuring the quality of an estimated resource description is a contentious issue as current measures do not provide an adequate indication of quality. In this paper, we provide an overview of these currently applied measures of resource description quality, before proposing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as an alternative. Through experimentation we illustrate the shortcomings of these past measures, whilst providing evidence that KL is a more appropriate measure of quality. When applying KL to compare different QBS algorithms, our experiments provide strong evidence in favour of a previously unsupported hypothesis originally posited in the initial Query-Based Sampling work

Unsupervised, Efficient and Semantic Expertise Retrieval

We introduce an unsupervised discriminative model for the task of retrieving experts in online document collections. We exclusively employ textual evidence and avoid explicit feature engineering by learning distributed word representations in an unsupervised way. We compare our model to state-of-the-art unsupervised statistical vector space and probabilistic generative approaches. Our proposed log-linear model achieves the retrieval performance levels of state-of-the-art document-centric methods with the low inference cost of so-called profile-centric approaches. It yields a statistically significant improved ranking over vector space and generative models in most cases, matching the performance of supervised methods on various benchmarks. That is, by using solely text we can do as well as methods that work with external evidence and/or relevance feedback. A contrastive analysis of rankings produced by discriminative and generative approaches shows that they have complementary strengths due to the ability of the unsupervised discriminative model to perform semantic matching.Comment: WWW2016, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. 201