Probabilistic retrieval models - relationships, context-specific application, selection and implementation

PhDRetrieval models are the core components of information retrieval systems, which guide the document and query representations, as well as the document ranking schemes. TF-IDF, binary independence retrieval (BIR) model and language modelling (LM) are three of the most influential contemporary models due to their stability and performance. The BIR model and LM have probabilistic theory as their basis, whereas TF-IDF is viewed as a heuristic model, whose theoretical justification always fascinates researchers. This thesis firstly investigates the parallel derivation of BIR model, LM and Poisson model, wrt event spaces, relevance assumptions and ranking rationales. It establishes a bridge between the BIR model and LM, and derives TF-IDF from the probabilistic framework. Then, the thesis presents the probabilistic logical modelling of the retrieval models. Various ways of how to estimate and aggregate probability, and alternative implementation to nonprobabilistic operator are demonstrated. Typical models have been implemented. The next contribution concerns the usage of of context-specific frequencies, i.e., the frequencies counted based on assorted element types or within different text scopes. The hypothesis is that they can help to rank the elements in structured document retrieval. The thesis applies context-specific frequencies on term weighting schemes in these models, and the outcome is a generalised retrieval model with regard to both element and document ranking. The retrieval models behave differently on the same query set: for some queries, one model performs better, for other queries, another model is superior. Therefore, one idea to improve the overall performance of a retrieval system is to choose for each query the model that is likely to perform the best. This thesis proposes and empirically explores the model selection method according to the correlation of query feature and query performance, which contributes to the methodology of dynamically choosing a model. In summary, this thesis contributes a study of probabilistic models and their relationships, the probabilistic logical modelling of retrieval models, the usage and effect of context-specific frequencies in models, and the selection of retrieval models

Effect of inverted index partitioning schemes on performance of query processing in parallel text retrieval systems

Shared-nothing, parallel text retrieval systems require an inverted index, representing a document collection, to be partitioned among a number of processors. In general, the index can be partitioned based on either the terms or documents in the collection, and the way the partitioning is done greatly affects the query processing performance of the parallel system. In this work, we investigate the effect of these two index partitioning schemes on query processing. We conduct experiments on a 32-node PC cluster, considering the case where index is completely stored in disk. Performance results are reported for a large (30 GB) document collection using an MPI-based parallel query processing implementation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

Parallel text retrieval on PC clusters

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The inverted index partitioning problem is investigated for parallel text retrieval systems. The objective is to perform efficient query processing on an inverted index distributed across a PC cluster. Alternative strategies are considered and evaluated for inverted index partitioning, where index entries are distributed according to their document-ids or term-ids. The performance of both partitioning schemes depend on the total number of disk accesses and the total volume of communication in the system. In document-id partitioning, the total volume of communication is naturally minimum, whereas the total number of disk accesses may be larger compared to term-id partitioning. On the other hand, in term-id partitioning the total number of disk accesses is already equivalent to the lower bound achieved by the sequential algorithm, albeit the total communication volume may be quite large. The studies done so far perform these partitioning schemes in a round-robin fashion and compare the performance of them by simulation. In this work, a parallel text retrieval system is designed and implemented on a PC cluster. We adopted hypergraph-theoretical partitioning models and carried out performance comparison of round-robin and hypergraph-theoretical partitioning schemes on our parallel text retrieval system. We also designed and implemented a query interface and a user interface of our system.Çatal, AytülM.S

Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page

MapReduce for information retrieval evaluation: "Let's quickly test this on 12 TB of data"

We propose to use MapReduce to quickly test new retrieval approaches on a cluster of machines by sequentially scanning all documents. We present a small case study in which we use a cluster of 15 low cost machines to search a web crawl of 0.5 billion pages showing that sequential scanning is a viable approach to running large-scale information retrieval experiments with little effort. The code is available to other researchers at: http://mirex.sourceforge.net

Transitive probabilistic CLIR models.

Transitive translation could be a useful technique to enlarge the number of supported language pairs for a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) system in a cost-effective manner. The paper describes several setups for transitive translation based on probabilistic translation models. The transitive CLIR models were evaluated on the CLEF test collection and yielded a retrieval effectiveness\ud up to 83% of monolingual performance, which is significantly better than a baseline using the synonym operator

Disambiguation strategies for cross-language information retrieval

This paper gives an overview of tools and methods for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that are developed within the Twenty-One project. The tools and methods are evaluated with the TREC CLIR task document collection using Dutch queries on the English document base. The main issue addressed here is an evaluation of two approaches to disambiguation. The underlying question is whether a lot of effort should be put in finding the correct translation for each query term before searching, or whether searching with more than one possible translation leads to better results? The experimental study suggests that the quality of search methods is more important than the quality of disambiguation methods. Good retrieval methods are able to disambiguate translated queries implicitly during searching