335 research outputs found
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
Finding Academic Experts on a MultiSensor Approach using Shannon's Entropy
Expert finding is an information retrieval task concerned with the search for
the most knowledgeable people, in some topic, with basis on documents
describing peoples activities. The task involves taking a user query as input
and returning a list of people sorted by their level of expertise regarding the
user query. This paper introduces a novel approach for combining multiple
estimators of expertise based on a multisensor data fusion framework together
with the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and Shannon's entropy. More
specifically, we defined three sensors which detect heterogeneous information
derived from the textual contents, from the graph structure of the citation
patterns for the community of experts, and from profile information about the
academic experts. Given the evidences collected, each sensor may define
different candidates as experts and consequently do not agree in a final
ranking decision. To deal with these conflicts, we applied the Dempster-Shafer
theory of evidence combined with Shannon's Entropy formula to fuse this
information and come up with a more accurate and reliable final ranking list.
Experiments made over two datasets of academic publications from the Computer
Science domain attest for the adequacy of the proposed approach over the
traditional state of the art approaches. We also made experiments against
representative supervised state of the art algorithms. Results revealed that
the proposed method achieved a similar performance when compared to these
supervised techniques, confirming the capabilities of the proposed framework
Learning to Rank Academic Experts in the DBLP Dataset
Expert finding is an information retrieval task that is concerned with the
search for the most knowledgeable people with respect to a specific topic, and
the search is based on documents that describe people's activities. The task
involves taking a user query as input and returning a list of people who are
sorted by their level of expertise with respect to the user query. Despite
recent interest in the area, the current state-of-the-art techniques lack in
principled approaches for optimally combining different sources of evidence.
This article proposes two frameworks for combining multiple estimators of
expertise. These estimators are derived from textual contents, from
graph-structure of the citation patterns for the community of experts, and from
profile information about the experts. More specifically, this article explores
the use of supervised learning to rank methods, as well as rank aggregation
approaches, for combing all of the estimators of expertise. Several supervised
learning algorithms, which are representative of the pointwise, pairwise and
listwise approaches, were tested, and various state-of-the-art data fusion
techniques were also explored for the rank aggregation framework. Experiments
that were performed on a dataset of academic publications from the Computer
Science domain attest the adequacy of the proposed approaches.Comment: Expert Systems, 2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1302.041
Voting for candidates: adapting data fusion techniques for an expert search task
In an expert search task, the users' need is to identify people who have relevant expertise to a topic of interest. An expert search system predicts and ranks the expertise of a set of candidate persons with respect to the users' query. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for predicting and ranking candidate expertise with respect to a query. We see the problem of ranking experts as a voting problem, which we model by adapting eleven data fusion techniques.We investigate the effectiveness of the voting approach and the associated data fusion techniques across a range of document weighting models, in the context of the TREC 2005 Enterprise track. The evaluation results show that the voting paradigm is very effective, without using any collection specific heuristics. Moreover, we show that improving the quality of the underlying document representation can significantly improve the retrieval performance of the data fusion techniques on an expert search task. In particular, we demonstrate that applying field-based weighting models improves the ranking of candidates. Finally, we demonstrate that the relative performance of the adapted data fusion techniques for the proposed approach is stable regardless of the used weighting models
Detection-by-Localization: Maintenance-Free Change Object Detector
Recent researches demonstrate that self-localization performance is a very
useful measure of likelihood-of-change (LoC) for change detection. In this
paper, this "detection-by-localization" scheme is studied in a novel
generalized task of object-level change detection. In our framework, a given
query image is segmented into object-level subimages (termed "scene parts"),
which are then converted to subimage-level pixel-wise LoC maps via the
detection-by-localization scheme. Our approach models a self-localization
system as a ranking function, outputting a ranked list of reference images,
without requiring relevance score. Thanks to this new setting, we can
generalize our approach to a broad class of self-localization systems. Our
ranking based self-localization model allows to fuse self-localization results
from different modalities via an unsupervised rank fusion derived from a field
of multi-modal information retrieval (MMR).Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Technical repor
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