Information Retrieval Models

Many applications that handle information on the internet would be completely\ud inadequate without the support of information retrieval technology. How would\ud we find information on the world wide web if there were no web search engines?\ud How would we manage our email without spam filtering? Much of the development\ud of information retrieval technology, such as web search engines and spam\ud filters, requires a combination of experimentation and theory. Experimentation\ud and rigorous empirical testing are needed to keep up with increasing volumes of\ud web pages and emails. Furthermore, experimentation and constant adaptation\ud of technology is needed in practice to counteract the effects of people that deliberately\ud try to manipulate the technology, such as email spammers. However,\ud if experimentation is not guided by theory, engineering becomes trial and error.\ud New problems and challenges for information retrieval come up constantly.\ud They cannot possibly be solved by trial and error alone. So, what is the theory\ud of information retrieval?\ud There is not one convincing answer to this question. There are many theories,\ud here called formal models, and each model is helpful for the development of\ud some information retrieval tools, but not so helpful for the development others.\ud In order to understand information retrieval, it is essential to learn about these\ud retrieval models. In this chapter, some of the most important retrieval models\ud are gathered and explained in a tutorial style

Retrieval Models based on Linguistic Features of Verbose Queries

Natural language expressions are more familiar to users than choosing keywords for queries. Given that, people can use natural language expressions to represent their sophisticated information needs. Instead of listing keywords, verbose queries are expressed in a grammatically well-formed phrase or sentence in which terms are used together to represent the more specific meanings of a concept, and the relationships of these concepts are expressed by function words. The goal of this thesis is to investigate methods of using the semantic and syntactic features of natural language queries to maximize the effectiveness of search. For this purpose, we propose the synchronous framework in which we use syntactic parsing techniques for modeling term dependencies. We use the Generative Relevance Hypothesis (GRH) to evaluate valid variations in dependence relationships between queries and documents. This is one of the first results demonstrating that dependency parsing can be used to improve retrieval effectiveness. We propose a method for classifying concepts in verbose queries as key concepts and secondary concepts that are used in the statistical translation model for query term expansion. Key concepts are the most important terms of queries. We use key concepts as the context for translating terms. Although secondary (key) concepts are not as important as key concepts, they are still important because they provide clues about what kinds of information users are looking for. Using concept classification results, we elaborate a translation model in which the key concepts of queries are used as the context of translation. The secondary concepts of queries are used to selectively apply the translation model to query terms. We define the important new task of focused retrieval of answer passages that aims to immediately provide answers for users\u27 information needs while the length of answer passage should be suitable for restricted search environments such as mobile devices and voice-based search systems

Lattice-based statistical spoken document retrieval

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Short queries, natural language and spoken documents retrieval: experiments at Glasgow University

This paper contains a description of the methodology and results of the three TREC submissions made by the Glasgow IR group (glair). In addition to submitting to the ad hoc task, submissions were also made to NLP track and to the SDR speech `pre-track'. Results from our submissions reveal that some of our approaches have performed poorly (i.e. ad hoc and NLP track), but we have also had success particularly in the speech track through use of transcript merging. We also highlight and discuss a seemingly unusual result where retrieval based on the very short versions of the TREC ad hoc queries produced better retrieval effectiveness than retrieval based on more `normal' length queries

Language Models and Smoothing Methods for Information Retrieval

Language Models and Smoothing Methods for Information Retrieval (Sprachmodelle und Glättungsmethoden für Information Retrieval) Najeeb A. Abdulmutalib Kurzfassung der Dissertation Retrievalmodelle bilden die theoretische Grundlage für effektive Information-Retrieval-Methoden. Statistische Sprachmodelle stellen eine neue Art von Retrievalmodellen dar, die seit etwa zehn Jahren in der Forschung betrachtet werde. Im Unterschied zu anderen Modellen können sie leichter an spezifische Aufgabenstellungen angepasst werden und liefern häufig bessere Retrievalergebnisse. In dieser Dissertation wird zunächst ein neues statistisches Sprachmodell vorgestellt, das explizit Dokumentlängen berücksichtigt. Aufgrund der spärlichen Beobachtungsdaten spielen Glättungsmethoden bei Sprachmodellen eine wichtige Rolle. Auch hierfür stellen wir eine neue Methode namens 'exponentieller Glättung' vor. Der experimentelle Vergleich mit konkurrierenden Ansätzen zeigt, dass unsere neuen Methoden insbesondere bei Kollektionen mit stark variierenden Dokumentlängen überlegene Ergebnisse liefert. In einem zweiten Schritt erweitern wir unseren Ansatz auf XML-Retrieval, wo hierarchisch strukturierte Dokumente betrachtet werden und beim fokussierten Retrieval möglichst kleine Dokumentteile gefunden werden sollen, die die Anfrage vollständig beantworten. Auch hier demonstriert der experimentelle Vergleich mit anderen Ansätzen die Qualität unserer neu entwickelten Methoden. Der dritte Teil der Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Vergleich von Sprachmodellen und der klassischen tf*idf-Gewichtung. Neben einem besseren Verständnis für die existierenden Glättungsmethoden führt uns dieser Ansatz zur Entwicklung des Verfahrens der 'empirischen Glättung'. Die damit durchgeführten Retrievalerexperimente zeigen Verbesserungen gegenüber anderen Glättungsverfahren.Language Models and Smoothing Methods for Information Retrieval Najeeb A. Abdulmutalib Abstract of the Dissertation Designing an effective retrieval model that can rank documents accurately for a given query has been a central problem in information retrieval for several decades. An optimal retrieval model that is both effective and efficient and that can learn from feedback information over time is needed. Language models are new generation of retrieval models and have been applied since the last ten years to solve many different information retrieval problems. Compared with the traditional models such as the vector space model, they can be more easily adapted to model non traditional and complex retrieval problems and empirically they tend to achieve comparable or better performance than the traditional models. Developing new language models is currently an active research area in information retrieval. In the first stage of this thesis we present a new language model based on an odds formula, which explicitly incorporates document length as a parameter. To address the problem of data sparsity where there is rarely enough data to accurately estimate the parameters of a language model, smoothing gives a way to combine less specific, more accurate information with more specific, but noisier data. We introduce a new smoothing method called exponential smoothing, which can be combined with most language models. We present experimental results for various language models and smoothing methods on a collection with large document length variation, and show that our new methods compare favourably with the best approaches known so far. We discuss the collection effect on the retrieval function, where we investigate the performance of well known models and compare the results conducted using two variant collections. In the second stage we extend the current model from flat text retrieval to XML retrieval since there is a need for content-oriented XML retrieval systems that can efficiently and effectively store, search and retrieve information from XML document collections. Compared to traditional information retrieval, where whole documents are usually indexed and retrieved as single complete units, information retrieval from XML documents creates additional retrieval challenges. By exploiting the logical document structure, XML allows for more focussed retrieval that identifies elements rather than documents as answers to user queries. Finally we show how smoothing plays a role very similar to that of the idf function: beside the obvious role of smoothing, it also improves the accuracy of the estimated language model. The within document frequency and the collection frequency of a term actually influence the probability of relevance, which led us to a new class of smoothing function based on numeric prediction, which we call empirical smoothing. Its retrieval quality outperforms that of other smoothing methods

Relating Dependent Terms in Information Retrieval

Les moteurs de recherche font partie de notre vie quotidienne. Actuellement, plus d’un tiers de la population mondiale utilise l’Internet. Les moteurs de recherche leur permettent de trouver rapidement les informations ou les produits qu'ils veulent. La recherche d'information (IR) est le fondement de moteurs de recherche modernes. Les approches traditionnelles de recherche d'information supposent que les termes d'indexation sont indépendants. Pourtant, les termes qui apparaissent dans le même contexte sont souvent dépendants. L’absence de la prise en compte de ces dépendances est une des causes de l’introduction de bruit dans le résultat (résultat non pertinents). Certaines études ont proposé d’intégrer certains types de dépendance, tels que la proximité, la cooccurrence, la contiguïté et de la dépendance grammaticale. Dans la plupart des cas, les modèles de dépendance sont construits séparément et ensuite combinés avec le modèle traditionnel de mots avec une importance constante. Par conséquent, ils ne peuvent pas capturer correctement la dépendance variable et la force de dépendance. Par exemple, la dépendance entre les mots adjacents "Black Friday" est plus importante que celle entre les mots "road constructions". Dans cette thèse, nous étudions différentes approches pour capturer les relations des termes et de leurs forces de dépendance. Nous avons proposé des méthodes suivantes: ─ Nous réexaminons l'approche de combinaison en utilisant différentes unités d'indexation pour la RI monolingue en chinois et la RI translinguistique entre anglais et chinois. En plus d’utiliser des mots, nous étudions la possibilité d'utiliser bi-gramme et uni-gramme comme unité de traduction pour le chinois. Plusieurs modèles de traduction sont construits pour traduire des mots anglais en uni-grammes, bi-grammes et mots chinois avec un corpus parallèle. Une requête en anglais est ensuite traduite de plusieurs façons, et un score classement est produit avec chaque traduction. Le score final de classement combine tous ces types de traduction. Nous considérons la dépendance entre les termes en utilisant la théorie d’évidence de Dempster-Shafer. Une occurrence d'un fragment de texte (de plusieurs mots) dans un document est considérée comme représentant l'ensemble de tous les termes constituants. La probabilité est assignée à un tel ensemble de termes plutôt qu’a chaque terme individuel. Au moment d’évaluation de requête, cette probabilité est redistribuée aux termes de la requête si ces derniers sont différents. Cette approche nous permet d'intégrer les relations de dépendance entre les termes. Nous proposons un modèle discriminant pour intégrer les différentes types de dépendance selon leur force et leur utilité pour la RI. Notamment, nous considérons la dépendance de contiguïté et de cooccurrence à de différentes distances, c’est-à-dire les bi-grammes et les paires de termes dans une fenêtre de 2, 4, 8 et 16 mots. Le poids d’un bi-gramme ou d’une paire de termes dépendants est déterminé selon un ensemble des caractères, en utilisant la régression SVM. Toutes les méthodes proposées sont évaluées sur plusieurs collections en anglais et/ou chinois, et les résultats expérimentaux montrent que ces méthodes produisent des améliorations substantielles sur l'état de l'art.Search engine has become an integral part of our life. More than one-third of world populations are Internet users. Most users turn to a search engine as the quick way to finding the information or product they want. Information retrieval (IR) is the foundation for modern search engines. Traditional information retrieval approaches assume that indexing terms are independent. However, terms occurring in the same context are often dependent. Failing to recognize the dependencies between terms leads to noise (irrelevant documents) in the result. Some studies have proposed to integrate term dependency of different types, such as proximity, co-occurrence, adjacency and grammatical dependency. In most cases, dependency models are constructed apart and then combined with the traditional word-based (unigram) model on a fixed importance proportion. Consequently, they cannot properly capture variable term dependency and its strength. For example, dependency between adjacent words “black Friday” is more important to consider than those of between “road constructions”. In this thesis, we try to study different approaches to capture term relationships and their dependency strengths. We propose the following methods for monolingual IR and Cross-Language IR (CLIR): We re-examine the combination approach by using different indexing units for Chinese monolingual IR, then propose the similar method for CLIR. In addition to the traditional method based on words, we investigate the possibility of using Chinese bigrams and unigrams as translation units. Several translation models from English words to Chinese unigrams, bigrams and words are created based on a parallel corpus. An English query is then translated in several ways, each producing a ranking score. The final ranking score combines all these types of translations. We incorporate dependencies between terms in our model using Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. Every occurrence of a text fragment in a document is represented as a set which includes all its implied terms. Probability is assigned to such a set of terms instead of individual terms. During query evaluation phase, the probability of the set can be transferred to those of the related query, allowing us to integrate language-dependent relations to IR. We propose a discriminative language model that integrates different term dependencies according to their strength and usefulness to IR. We consider the dependency of adjacency and co-occurrence within different distances, i.e. bigrams, pairs of terms within text window of size 2, 4, 8 and 16. The weight of bigram or a pair of dependent terms in the final model is learnt according to a set of features. All the proposed methods are evaluated on several English and/or Chinese collections, and experimental results show these methods achieve substantial improvements over state-of-the-art baselines

Neural Generative Models and Representation Learning for Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) concerns about the structure, analysis, organization, storage, and retrieval of information. Among different retrieval models proposed in the past decades, generative retrieval models, especially those under the statistical probabilistic framework, are one of the most popular techniques that have been widely applied to Information Retrieval problems. While they are famous for their well-grounded theory and good empirical performance in text retrieval, their applications in IR are often limited by their complexity and low extendability in the modeling of high-dimensional information. Recently, advances in deep learning techniques provide new opportunities for representation learning and generative models for information retrieval. In contrast to statistical models, neural models have much more flexibility because they model information and data correlation in latent spaces without explicitly relying on any prior knowledge. Previous studies on pattern recognition and natural language processing have shown that semantically meaningful representations of text, images, and many types of information can be acquired with neural models through supervised or unsupervised training. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of neural models for information retrieval is mostly unexplored. In this thesis, we study how to develop new generative models and representation learning frameworks with neural models for information retrieval. Specifically, our contributions include three main components: (1) Theoretical Analysis: We present the first theoretical analysis and adaptation of existing neural embedding models for ad-hoc retrieval tasks; (2) Design Practice: Based on our experience and knowledge, we show how to design an embedding-based neural generative model for practical information retrieval tasks such as personalized product search; And (3) Generic Framework: We further generalize our proposed neural generative framework for complicated heterogeneous information retrieval scenarios that concern text, images, knowledge entities, and their relationships. Empirical results show that the proposed neural generative framework can effectively learn information representations and construct retrieval models that outperform the state-of-the-art systems in a variety of IR tasks

Fisher Kernels and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Models

Tasks that rely on semantic content of documents, notably Information Retrieval and Document Classification, can benefit from a good account of document context, i.e. the semantic association between documents. To this effect, the scheme of latent semantics blends individual words appearing throughout a document collection into latent topics, thus providing a way to handle documents that is less constrained than the conventional approach by the mere appearance of such or such word. Probabilistic latent semantic models take the matter further by providing assumptions on how the documents observed in the collection would have been generated. This allows derivation of inference algorithms that can fit the model parameters to the observed document collection; with their values set, these parameters can then be used to compute the similarities between documents. The Fisher kernels, similarity functions rooted in information geometry, constitute good candidates to measure the similarity between documents in the framework of probabilistic latent semantic models. In this context, we study the use of Fisher kernels for the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI) model. By thoroughly analysing the generative process of PLSI, we derive the proper Fisher kernel for PLSI and expose the hypotheses that relate former work to this kernel. In particular, we confirm that the Fisher information matrix (FIM) should not be approximated by the identity in the case of PLSI. We also study the impact on the performances of the Fisher kernel of the contribution of the latent topics and the one of the distribution of words among the topics; eventually, we provide empirical evidence, and theoretical arguments, showing that the Fisher kernel originally published by Hofmann, corrected to account for FIM, is the best of the PLSI Fisher kernels. It can compete with the strong BM25 baseline, and even significantly outperforms it when documents sharing few words must be matched. We further study of PLSI document similarities by applying the Language model approach. This approach shuns the usual IR paradigm that considers documents and queries to be of a similar nature. Instead, they consider documents as being representative of language models, and use probabilistic tools to determine which of these models would have generated the query with highest probability. Using this scheme in the framework of PLSI provides a way to bypass the issue of query representation, which constitutes one of the specific challenges of PLSI. We find the Language model approach to perform as well as the best of the Fisher kernels when enough latent categories are provided. Eventually, we propose a new probabilistic latent semantic model consisting in a mixture of Smoothed Dirichlet distributions which, by better modeling word burstiness, provides a more realistic model of empirical observations on real document collections than the usually used Multinomials