771 research outputs found
Knowledge-based Query Expansion in Real-Time Microblog Search
Since the length of microblog texts, such as tweets, is strictly limited to
140 characters, traditional Information Retrieval techniques suffer from the
vocabulary mismatch problem severely and cannot yield good performance in the
context of microblogosphere. To address this critical challenge, in this paper,
we propose a new language modeling approach for microblog retrieval by
inferring various types of context information. In particular, we expand the
query using knowledge terms derived from Freebase so that the expanded one can
better reflect users' search intent. Besides, in order to further satisfy
users' real-time information need, we incorporate temporal evidences into the
expansion method, which can boost recent tweets in the retrieval results with
respect to a given topic. Experimental results on two official TREC Twitter
corpora demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over baseline
methods.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
On the Impact of Entity Linking in Microblog Real-Time Filtering
Microblogging is a model of content sharing in which the temporal locality of
posts with respect to important events, either of foreseeable or unforeseeable
nature, makes applica- tions of real-time filtering of great practical
interest. We propose the use of Entity Linking (EL) in order to improve the
retrieval effectiveness, by enriching the representation of microblog posts and
filtering queries. EL is the process of recognizing in an unstructured text the
mention of relevant entities described in a knowledge base. EL of short pieces
of text is a difficult task, but it is also a scenario in which the information
EL adds to the text can have a substantial impact on the retrieval process. We
implement a start-of-the-art filtering method, based on the best systems from
the TREC Microblog track realtime adhoc retrieval and filtering tasks , and
extend it with a Wikipedia-based EL method. Results show that the use of EL
significantly improves over non-EL based versions of the filtering methods.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. SAC 2015, Salamanca, Spain - April 13 -
17, 201
A Vertical PRF Architecture for Microblog Search
In microblog retrieval, query expansion can be essential to obtain good
search results due to the short size of queries and posts. Since information in
microblogs is highly dynamic, an up-to-date index coupled with pseudo-relevance
feedback (PRF) with an external corpus has a higher chance of retrieving more
relevant documents and improving ranking. In this paper, we focus on the
research question:how can we reduce the query expansion computational cost
while maintaining the same retrieval precision as standard PRF? Therefore, we
propose to accelerate the query expansion step of pseudo-relevance feedback.
The hypothesis is that using an expansion corpus organized into verticals for
expanding the query, will lead to a more efficient query expansion process and
improved retrieval effectiveness. Thus, the proposed query expansion method
uses a distributed search architecture and resource selection algorithms to
provide an efficient query expansion process. Experiments on the TREC Microblog
datasets show that the proposed approach can match or outperform standard PRF
in MAP and NDCG@30, with a computational cost that is three orders of magnitude
lower.Comment: To appear in ICTIR 201
Modeling Temporal Evidence from External Collections
Newsworthy events are broadcast through multiple mediums and prompt the
crowds to produce comments on social media. In this paper, we propose to
leverage on this behavioral dynamics to estimate the most relevant time periods
for an event (i.e., query). Recent advances have shown how to improve the
estimation of the temporal relevance of such topics. In this approach, we build
on two major novelties. First, we mine temporal evidences from hundreds of
external sources into topic-based external collections to improve the
robustness of the detection of relevant time periods. Second, we propose a
formal retrieval model that generalizes the use of the temporal dimension
across different aspects of the retrieval process. In particular, we show that
temporal evidence of external collections can be used to (i) infer a topic's
temporal relevance, (ii) select the query expansion terms, and (iii) re-rank
the final results for improved precision. Experiments with TREC Microblog
collections show that the proposed time-aware retrieval model makes an
effective and extensive use of the temporal dimension to improve search results
over the most recent temporal models. Interestingly, we observe a strong
correlation between precision and the temporal distribution of retrieved and
relevant documents.Comment: To appear in WSDM 201
An evaluation of the role of sentiment in second screen microblog search tasks
The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for information retrieval and web data mining research. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user's query at a point in time, automated methods are required to sift through this information. Sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling microblog content. We build and evaluate a sentiment-based filtering system using real-time user studies. We find a significant role played by sentiment in the search scenarios, observing detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users' prior topic sentiment
EveTAR: Building a Large-Scale Multi-Task Test Collection over Arabic Tweets
This article introduces a new language-independent approach for creating a
large-scale high-quality test collection of tweets that supports multiple
information retrieval (IR) tasks without running a shared-task campaign. The
adopted approach (demonstrated over Arabic tweets) designs the collection
around significant (i.e., popular) events, which enables the development of
topics that represent frequent information needs of Twitter users for which
rich content exists. That inherently facilitates the support of multiple tasks
that generally revolve around events, namely event detection, ad-hoc search,
timeline generation, and real-time summarization. The key highlights of the
approach include diversifying the judgment pool via interactive search and
multiple manually-crafted queries per topic, collecting high-quality
annotations via crowd-workers for relevancy and in-house annotators for
novelty, filtering out low-agreement topics and inaccessible tweets, and
providing multiple subsets of the collection for better availability. Applying
our methodology on Arabic tweets resulted in EveTAR , the first
freely-available tweet test collection for multiple IR tasks. EveTAR includes a
crawl of 355M Arabic tweets and covers 50 significant events for which about
62K tweets were judged with substantial average inter-annotator agreement
(Kappa value of 0.71). We demonstrate the usability of EveTAR by evaluating
existing algorithms in the respective tasks. Results indicate that the new
collection can support reliable ranking of IR systems that is comparable to
similar TREC collections, while providing strong baseline results for future
studies over Arabic tweets
Query Expansion for Survey Question Retrieval in the Social Sciences
In recent years, the importance of research data and the need to archive and
to share it in the scientific community have increased enormously. This
introduces a whole new set of challenges for digital libraries. In the social
sciences typical research data sets consist of surveys and questionnaires. In
this paper we focus on the use case of social science survey question reuse and
on mechanisms to support users in the query formulation for data sets. We
describe and evaluate thesaurus- and co-occurrence-based approaches for query
expansion to improve retrieval quality in digital libraries and research data
archives. The challenge here is to translate the information need and the
underlying sociological phenomena into proper queries. As we can show retrieval
quality can be improved by adding related terms to the queries. In a direct
comparison automatically expanded queries using extracted co-occurring terms
can provide better results than queries manually reformulated by a domain
expert and better results than a keyword-based BM25 baseline.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of 19th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Digital Libraries 2015 (TPDL 2015
An investigation of term weighting approaches for microblog retrieval
The use of effective term frequency weighting and document length normalisation strategies have been shown over a number of decades to have a significant positive effect for document retrieval. When dealing with much shorter documents, such as those obtained from microblogs, it would seem intuitive that these would have less benefit. In this paper we investigate their effect on microblog retrieval performance using the Tweets2011 collection from the TREC 2011 Microblog Track
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