1,448 research outputs found
Exploiting Query Structure and Document Structure to Improve Document Retrieval Effectiveness
In this paper we present a systematic analysis of document
retrieval using unstructured and structured queries within
the score region algebra (SRA) structured retrieval framework. The behavior of di®erent retrieval models, namely
Boolean, tf.idf, GPX, language models, and Okapi, is tested
using the transparent SRA framework in our three-level structured retrieval system called TIJAH. The retrieval models are implemented along four elementary retrieval aspects: element and term selection, element score computation, score combination, and score propagation.
The analysis is performed on a numerous experiments
evaluated on TREC and CLEF collections, using manually
generated unstructured and structured queries. Unstructured queries range from the short title queries to long title
+ description + narrative queries. For generating structured
queries we exploit the knowledge of the document structure
and the content used to semantically describe or classify
documents. We show that such structured information can
be utilized in retrieval engines to give more precise answers to user queries then when using unstructured queries
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Local search: A guide for the information retrieval practitioner
There are a number of combinatorial optimisation problems in information retrieval in which the use of local search methods are worthwhile. The purpose of this paper is to show how local search can be used to solve some well known tasks in information retrieval (IR), how previous research in the field is piecemeal, bereft of a structure and methodologically flawed, and to suggest more rigorous ways of applying local search methods to solve IR problems. We provide a query based taxonomy for analysing the use of local search in IR tasks and an overview of issues such as fitness functions, statistical significance and test collections when conducting experiments on combinatorial optimisation problems. The paper gives a guide on the pitfalls and problems for IR practitioners who wish to use local search to solve their research issues, and gives practical advice on the use of such methods. The query based taxonomy is a novel structure which can be used by the IR practitioner in order to examine the use of local search in IR
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An experimental comparison of a genetic algorithm and a hill-climber for term selection
Purpose – The term selection problem for selecting query terms in information filtering and routing has been investigated using hill-climbers of various kinds, largely through the Okapi experiments in the TREC series of conferences. Although these are simple deterministic approaches which examine the effect of changing the weight of one term at a time, they have been shown to improve the retrieval effectiveness of filtering queries in these TREC experiments. Hill-climbers are, however, likely to get trapped in local optima, and the use of more sophisticated local search techniques for this problem that attempt to break out of these optima are worth investigating. To this end, we apply a genetic algorithm (GA) to the same problem.
Design/Methodology/Approach – We use a standard TREC test collection from the TREC-8 filtering track, recording mean average precision and recall measures to allow comparison between the hillclimber and GA algorithms. We also vary elements of the GA, such as probability of a word being included, probability of mutation and population size in order to measure the effect of these variables. Different strategies such as Elitist and Non-Elitist methods are used, as well as Roulette Wheel and Rank selection GA algorithms.
Findings – The results of tests suggest that both techniques are, on average, better than the baseline, but the implemented GA does not match the overall performance of a hill-climber. The Rank selection algorithm does better on average than the Roulette Wheel algorithm. There is no evidence in this study that varying word inclusion probability, mutation probability or Elitist method make much difference to the overall results. Small population sizes do not appear to be as effective as larger population sizes.
Research limitations/implications – The evidence provided here would suggest that being stuck in a local optima for the term selection optimization problem does not appear to be detrimental to the overall success of the hill-climber. The evidence from term rank order would appear to provide extra useful evidence which hill-climbers can use efficiently and effectively to narrow the search space.
Originality/Value – The paper represents the first attempt to compare hill-climbers with GAs on a problem of this type
Multiple Retrieval Models and Regression Models for Prior Art Search
This paper presents the system called PATATRAS (PATent and Article Tracking,
Retrieval and AnalysiS) realized for the IP track of CLEF 2009. Our approach
presents three main characteristics: 1. The usage of multiple retrieval models
(KL, Okapi) and term index definitions (lemma, phrase, concept) for the three
languages considered in the present track (English, French, German) producing
ten different sets of ranked results. 2. The merging of the different results
based on multiple regression models using an additional validation set created
from the patent collection. 3. The exploitation of patent metadata and of the
citation structures for creating restricted initial working sets of patents and
for producing a final re-ranking regression model. As we exploit specific
metadata of the patent documents and the citation relations only at the
creation of initial working sets and during the final post ranking step, our
architecture remains generic and easy to extend
Topic-based mixture language modelling
This paper describes an approach for constructing a mixture of language models based on simple statistical notions of semantics using probabilistic models developed for information retrieval. The approach encapsulates corpus-derived semantic information and is able to model varying styles of text. Using such information, the corpus texts are clustered in an unsupervised manner and a mixture of topic-specific language models is automatically created. The principal contribution of this work is to characterise the document space resulting from information retrieval techniques and to demonstrate the approach for mixture language modelling.
A comparison is made between manual and automatic clustering in order to elucidate how the global content information is expressed in the space. We also compare (in terms of association with manual clustering and language modelling accuracy) alternative term-weighting schemes and the effect of singular value decomposition dimension reduction (latent semantic analysis). Test set perplexity results using the British National Corpus indicate that the approach can improve the potential of statistical language modelling. Using an adaptive procedure, the conventional model may be tuned to track text data with a slight increase in computational cost
Document expansion for text-based image retrieval at WikipediaMM 2010
We describe and analyze our participation in the Wikipedi-
aMM task at ImageCLEF 2010. Our approach is based on text-based image retrieval using information retrieval techniques on the metadata documents of the images. We submitted two English monolingual runs and one multilingual run. The monolingual runs used the query to retrieve the metadata document with the query and document in the same
language; the multilingual run used queries in one language to search the metadata provided in three languages. The main focus of our work was using the English query to retrieve images based on the English meta-data. For these experiments the English metadata data was expanded using an external resource - DBpedia. This study expanded on our application of document expansion in our previous participation in Image-CLEF 2009. In 2010 we combined document expansion with a document reduction technique which aimed to include only topically important words to the metadata. Our experiments used the Okapi feedback algorithm for document expansion and Okapi BM25 model for retrieval. Experimental results show that combining document expansion with the document reduction method give the best overall retrieval results
Document expansion for image retrieval
Successful information retrieval requires e�ective matching
between the user's search request and the contents of relevant
documents. Often the request entered by a user may
not use the same topic relevant terms as the authors' of the
documents. One potential approach to address problems
of query-document term mismatch is document expansion
to include additional topically relevant indexing terms in a
document which may encourage its retrieval when relevant
to queries which do not match its original contents well. We
propose and evaluate a new document expansion method
using external resources. While results of previous research
have been inconclusive in determining the impact of document
expansion on retrieval e�ectiveness, our method is
shown to work e�ectively for text-based image retrieval of
short image annotation documents. Our approach uses the
Okapi query expansion algorithm as a method for document
expansion. We further show improved performance can be
achieved by using a \document reduction" approach to include
only the signi�cant terms in a document in the expansion
process. Our experiments on the WikipediaMM task at
ImageCLEF 2008 show an increase of 16.5% in mean average
precision (MAP) compared to a variation of Okapi BM25 retrieval
model. To compare document expansion with query
expansion, we also test query expansion from an external resource
which leads an improvement by 9.84% in MAP over
our baseline. Our conclusion is that the document expansion
with document reduction and in combination with query expansion
produces the overall best retrieval results for shortlength
document retrieval. For this image retrieval task, we
also concluded that query expansion from external resource
does not outperform the document expansion method
The University of Glasgow at ImageClefPhoto 2009
In this paper we describe the approaches adopted to generate the five runs submitted to ImageClefPhoto 2009 by the University of Glasgow. The aim of our methods is to exploit document diversity in the rankings. All our runs used text statistics extracted from the captions associated to each image in the collection, except one run which combines the textual statistics with visual features extracted from the provided images.
The results suggest that our methods based on text captions significantly improve the performance of the respective baselines, while the approach that combines visual features with text statistics shows lower levels of improvements
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