20,372 research outputs found
A study of query expansion methods for patent retrieval
Patent retrieval is a recall-oriented search task where the objective is to find all possible relevant documents. Queries in patent retrieval are typically very long since they take the form of a patent claim or even a full patent application in the case of priorart patent search. Nevertheless, there is generally a significant mismatch between the query and the relevant documents, often leading to low retrieval effectiveness. Some previous work has
tried to address this mismatch through the application of query expansion (QE) techniques which have generally showed
effectiveness for many other retrieval tasks. However, results of QE on patent search have been found to be very disappointing. We present a review of previous investigations of QE in patent retrieval, and explore some of these techniques on a prior-art patent search task. In addition, a novel method for QE using automatically generated synonyms set is presented. While previous QE techniques fail to improve over baseline retrieval, our new approach show statistically better retrieval precision over
the baseline, although not for recall. In addition, it proves to be significantly more efficient than existing techniques. An extensive analysis to the results is presented which seeks to better understand situations where these QE techniques succeed or fail
United we fall, divided we stand: A study of query segmentation and PRF for patent prior art search
Previous research in patent search has shown that reducing queries by extracting a few key terms is ineffective primarily because of the vocabulary mismatch between patent applications used as queries and existing patent documents. This ļ¬nding has led to the use of full patent applications as queries in patent prior art search. In addition, standard information retrieval (IR) techniques such as query expansion (QE) do not work effectively with patent queries, principally because of the presence of noise terms in the massive queries. In this study, we take a new approach to QE for patent search. Text segmentation is used to decompose a patent query into selfcoherent sub-topic blocks. Each of these much shorted sub-topic blocks which is representative of a speciļ¬c aspect or facet of the invention, is then used as a query to retrieve documents. Documents retrieved using the different resulting sub-queries or query streams are interleaved to construct a ļ¬nal ranked list. This technique can exploit the potential beneļ¬t of QE since the segmented
queries are generally more focused and less ambiguous than the full patent query. Experiments on the CLEF-2010 IP prior-art search task show that the proposed method outperforms the retrieval effectiveness achieved when using a single full patent application text as the query, and also demonstrates the potential beneļ¬ts of QE to alleviate the vocabulary mismatch problem in patent search
Pytrec_eval: An Extremely Fast Python Interface to trec_eval
We introduce pytrec_eval, a Python interface to the tree_eval information
retrieval evaluation toolkit. pytrec_eval exposes the reference implementations
of trec_eval within Python as a native extension. We show that pytrec_eval is
around one order of magnitude faster than invoking trec_eval as a sub process
from within Python. Compared to a native Python implementation of NDCG,
pytrec_eval is twice as fast for practically-sized rankings. Finally, we
demonstrate its effectiveness in an application where pytrec_eval is combined
with Pyndri and the OpenAI Gym where query expansion is learned using
Q-learning.Comment: SIGIR '18. The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research &
Development in Information Retrieva
The Best Trail Algorithm for Assisted Navigation of Web Sites
We present an algorithm called the Best Trail Algorithm, which helps solve
the hypertext navigation problem by automating the construction of memex-like
trails through the corpus. The algorithm performs a probabilistic best-first
expansion of a set of navigation trees to find relevant and compact trails. We
describe the implementation of the algorithm, scoring methods for trails,
filtering algorithms and a new metric called \emph{potential gain} which
measures the potential of a page for future navigation opportunities.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure
Relevance-based Word Embedding
Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also
known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural
language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are
typically learned based on term proximity in a large corpus. This means that
the objective in well-known word embedding algorithms, e.g., word2vec, is to
accurately predict adjacent word(s) for a given word or context. However, this
objective is not necessarily equivalent to the goal of many information
retrieval (IR) tasks. The primary objective in various IR tasks is to capture
relevance instead of term proximity, syntactic, or even semantic similarity.
This is the motivation for developing unsupervised relevance-based word
embedding models that learn word representations based on query-document
relevance information. In this paper, we propose two learning models with
different objective functions; one learns a relevance distribution over the
vocabulary set for each query, and the other classifies each term as belonging
to the relevant or non-relevant class for each query. To train our models, we
used over six million unique queries and the top ranked documents retrieved in
response to each query, which are assumed to be relevant to the query. We
extrinsically evaluate our learned word representation models using two IR
tasks: query expansion and query classification. Both query expansion
experiments on four TREC collections and query classification experiments on
the KDD Cup 2005 dataset suggest that the relevance-based word embedding models
significantly outperform state-of-the-art proximity-based embedding models,
such as word2vec and GloVe.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '17
Simplifying Deep-Learning-Based Model for Code Search
To accelerate software development, developers frequently search and reuse
existing code snippets from a large-scale codebase, e.g., GitHub. Over the
years, researchers proposed many information retrieval (IR) based models for
code search, which match keywords in query with code text. But they fail to
connect the semantic gap between query and code. To conquer this challenge, Gu
et al. proposed a deep-learning-based model named DeepCS. It jointly embeds
method code and natural language description into a shared vector space, where
methods related to a natural language query are retrieved according to their
vector similarities. However, DeepCS' working process is complicated and
time-consuming. To overcome this issue, we proposed a simplified model
CodeMatcher that leverages the IR technique but maintains many features in
DeepCS. Generally, CodeMatcher combines query keywords with the original order,
performs a fuzzy search on name and body strings of methods, and returned the
best-matched methods with the longer sequence of used keywords. We verified its
effectiveness on a large-scale codebase with about 41k repositories.
Experimental results showed the simplified model CodeMatcher outperforms DeepCS
by 97% in terms of MRR (a widely used accuracy measure for code search), and it
is over 66 times faster than DeepCS. Besides, comparing with the
state-of-the-art IR-based model CodeHow, CodeMatcher also improves the MRR by
73%. We also observed that: fusing the advantages of IR-based and
deep-learning-based models is promising because they compensate with each other
by nature; improving the quality of method naming helps code search, since
method name plays an important role in connecting query and code
Enhancing access to the Bibliome: the TREC 2004 Genomics Track
BACKGROUND: The goal of the TREC Genomics Track is to improve information retrieval in the area of genomics by creating test collections that will allow researchers to improve and better understand failures of their systems. The 2004 track included an ad hoc retrieval task, simulating use of a search engine to obtain documents about biomedical topics. This paper describes the Genomics Track of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) 2004, a forum for evaluation of IR research systems, where retrieval in the genomics domain has recently begun to be assessed. RESULTS: A total of 27 research groups submitted 47 different runs. The most effective runs, as measured by the primary evaluation measure of mean average precision (MAP), used a combination of domain-specific and general techniques. The best MAP obtained by any run was 0.4075. Techniques that expanded queries with gene name lists as well as words from related articles had the best efficacy. However, many runs performed more poorly than a simple baseline run, indicating that careful selection of system features is essential. CONCLUSION: Various approaches to ad hoc retrieval provide a diversity of efficacy. The TREC Genomics Track and its test collection resources provide tools that allow improvement in information retrieval systems
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