A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

Term-Specific Eigenvector-Centrality in Multi-Relation Networks

Fuzzy matching and ranking are two information retrieval techniques widely used in web search. Their application to structured data, however, remains an open problem. This article investigates how eigenvector-centrality can be used for approximate matching in multi-relation graphs, that is, graphs where connections of many different types may exist. Based on an extension of the PageRank matrix, eigenvectors representing the distribution of a term after propagating term weights between related data items are computed. The result is an index which takes the document structure into account and can be used with standard document retrieval techniques. As the scheme takes the shape of an index transformation, all necessary calculations are performed during index tim

Expanding Database Keyword Search for Database Exploration

AbstractDatabase keyword search (DB KWS) has received a lot of attention in database research community. Although much of the research has been motivated by improving performance, recent research has also paid increased attention to its role in database contents exploration or data mining. In this paper we explore aspects related to DB KWS in two steps: First, we expand DB KWS by incorporating ontologies to better capture users’ intention. Furthermore, we examine how KWS or ontology-enriched KWS can offer useful hints for better understanding of the data and in-depth analysis of the data contents, or data mining

Scalable Image Retrieval by Sparse Product Quantization

Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search technique for high-dimensional feature indexing and retrieval is the crux of large-scale image retrieval. A recent promising technique is Product Quantization, which attempts to index high-dimensional image features by decomposing the feature space into a Cartesian product of low dimensional subspaces and quantizing each of them separately. Despite the promising results reported, their quantization approach follows the typical hard assignment of traditional quantization methods, which may result in large quantization errors and thus inferior search performance. Unlike the existing approaches, in this paper, we propose a novel approach called Sparse Product Quantization (SPQ) to encoding the high-dimensional feature vectors into sparse representation. We optimize the sparse representations of the feature vectors by minimizing their quantization errors, making the resulting representation is essentially close to the original data in practice. Experiments show that the proposed SPQ technique is not only able to compress data, but also an effective encoding technique. We obtain state-of-the-art results for ANN search on four public image datasets and the promising results of content-based image retrieval further validate the efficacy of our proposed method.Comment: 12 page

Enhancing Information Retrieval Relevance Using Touch Dynamics on Search Engine

Using Touch Dynamics on Search Engine is an attempt to establish the possibilities of using user touch behavior which is monitored and several unique features are extracted. The unique features are used for identifying users and their traits according to the touch dynamics. The results can be used for defining automatic user unique searching behavior. Touch dynamics has been discussed in several studies in the context of user authentication and biometric identification for security purposes. This study establishes the possibility of integrating touch dynamics results for identifying user searching preferences and interests. This study investigates a technique of combining personalized search with touch dynamics results information as an approach for determining user preferences, interest measurement and context. Keywords: Personalized Search, Information Retrieval, Touch Dynamics, Search Engin