siEDM: an efficient string index and search algorithm for edit distance with moves

Although several self-indexes for highly repetitive text collections exist, developing an index and search algorithm with editing operations remains a challenge. Edit distance with moves (EDM) is a string-to-string distance measure that includes substring moves in addition to ordinal editing operations to turn one string into another. Although the problem of computing EDM is intractable, it has a wide range of potential applications, especially in approximate string retrieval. Despite the importance of computing EDM, there has been no efficient method for indexing and searching large text collections based on the EDM measure. We propose the first algorithm, named string index for edit distance with moves (siEDM), for indexing and searching strings with EDM. The siEDM algorithm builds an index structure by leveraging the idea behind the edit sensitive parsing (ESP), an efficient algorithm enabling approximately computing EDM with guarantees of upper and lower bounds for the exact EDM. siEDM efficiently prunes the space for searching query strings by the proposed method, which enables fast query searches with the same guarantee as ESP. We experimentally tested the ability of siEDM to index and search strings on benchmark datasets, and we showed siEDM's efficiency.Comment: 23 page

Query by String word spotting based on character bi-gram indexing

In this paper we propose a segmentation-free query by string word spotting method. Both the documents and query strings are encoded using a recently proposed word representa- tion that projects images and strings into a common atribute space based on a pyramidal histogram of characters(PHOC). These attribute models are learned using linear SVMs over the Fisher Vector representation of the images along with the PHOC labels of the corresponding strings. In order to search through the whole page, document regions are indexed per character bi- gram using a similar attribute representation. On top of that, we propose an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model for efficient computation. Finally we introduce a re-ranking step in order to boost retrieval performance. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query by string word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasetsComment: To be published in ICDAR201

Universal Indexes for Highly Repetitive Document Collections

Indexing highly repetitive collections has become a relevant problem with the emergence of large repositories of versioned documents, among other applications. These collections may reach huge sizes, but are formed mostly of documents that are near-copies of others. Traditional techniques for indexing these collections fail to properly exploit their regularities in order to reduce space. We introduce new techniques for compressing inverted indexes that exploit this near-copy regularity. They are based on run-length, Lempel-Ziv, or grammar compression of the differential inverted lists, instead of the usual practice of gap-encoding them. We show that, in this highly repetitive setting, our compression methods significantly reduce the space obtained with classical techniques, at the price of moderate slowdowns. Moreover, our best methods are universal, that is, they do not need to know the versioning structure of the collection, nor that a clear versioning structure even exists. We also introduce compressed self-indexes in the comparison. These are designed for general strings (not only natural language texts) and represent the text collection plus the index structure (not an inverted index) in integrated form. We show that these techniques can compress much further, using a small fraction of the space required by our new inverted indexes. Yet, they are orders of magnitude slower.Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sk{\l}odowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 69094

Toward Entity-Aware Search

As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability

Handling Massive N-Gram Datasets Efficiently

This paper deals with the two fundamental problems concerning the handling of large n-gram language models: indexing, that is compressing the n-gram strings and associated satellite data without compromising their retrieval speed; and estimation, that is computing the probability distribution of the strings from a large textual source. Regarding the problem of indexing, we describe compressed, exact and lossless data structures that achieve, at the same time, high space reductions and no time degradation with respect to state-of-the-art solutions and related software packages. In particular, we present a compressed trie data structure in which each word following a context of fixed length k, i.e., its preceding k words, is encoded as an integer whose value is proportional to the number of words that follow such context. Since the number of words following a given context is typically very small in natural languages, we lower the space of representation to compression levels that were never achieved before. Despite the significant savings in space, our technique introduces a negligible penalty at query time. Regarding the problem of estimation, we present a novel algorithm for estimating modified Kneser-Ney language models, that have emerged as the de-facto choice for language modeling in both academia and industry, thanks to their relatively low perplexity performance. Estimating such models from large textual sources poses the challenge of devising algorithms that make a parsimonious use of the disk. The state-of-the-art algorithm uses three sorting steps in external memory: we show an improved construction that requires only one sorting step thanks to exploiting the properties of the extracted n-gram strings. With an extensive experimental analysis performed on billions of n-grams, we show an average improvement of 4.5X on the total running time of the state-of-the-art approach.Comment: Published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), February 2019, Article No: 2

CONTEXT-BASED AUTOSUGGEST ON GRAPH DATA

Autosuggest is an important feature in any search applications. Currently, most applications only suggest a single term based on how frequent that term appears in the indexed documents or how often it is searched upon. These approaches might not provide the most relevant suggestions because users often enter a series of related query terms to answer a question they have in mind. In this project, we implemented the Smart Solr Suggester plugin using a context-based approach that takes into account the relationships among search keywords. In particular, we used the keywords that the user has chosen so far in the search text box as the context to autosuggest their next incomplete keyword. This context-based approach uses the relationships between entities in the graph data that the user is searching on and therefore would provide more meaningful suggestions