67,381 research outputs found
On Type-Aware Entity Retrieval
Today, the practice of returning entities from a knowledge base in response
to search queries has become widespread. One of the distinctive characteristics
of entities is that they are typed, i.e., assigned to some hierarchically
organized type system (type taxonomy). The primary objective of this paper is
to gain a better understanding of how entity type information can be utilized
in entity retrieval. We perform this investigation in an idealized "oracle"
setting, assuming that we know the distribution of target types of the relevant
entities for a given query. We perform a thorough analysis of three main
aspects: (i) the choice of type taxonomy, (ii) the representation of
hierarchical type information, and (iii) the combination of type-based and
term-based similarity in the retrieval model. Using a standard entity search
test collection based on DBpedia, we find that type information proves most
useful when using large type taxonomies that provide very specific types. We
provide further insights on the extensional coverage of entities and on the
utility of target types.Comment: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on the Theory of
Information Retrieval (ICTIR '17), 201
Toward Entity-Aware Search
As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability
Ranking Archived Documents for Structured Queries on Semantic Layers
Archived collections of documents (like newspaper and web archives) serve as
important information sources in a variety of disciplines, including Digital
Humanities, Historical Science, and Journalism. However, the absence of
efficient and meaningful exploration methods still remains a major hurdle in
the way of turning them into usable sources of information. A semantic layer is
an RDF graph that describes metadata and semantic information about a
collection of archived documents, which in turn can be queried through a
semantic query language (SPARQL). This allows running advanced queries by
combining metadata of the documents (like publication date) and content-based
semantic information (like entities mentioned in the documents). However, the
results returned by such structured queries can be numerous and moreover they
all equally match the query. In this paper, we deal with this problem and
formalize the task of "ranking archived documents for structured queries on
semantic layers". Then, we propose two ranking models for the problem at hand
which jointly consider: i) the relativeness of documents to entities, ii) the
timeliness of documents, and iii) the temporal relations among the entities.
The experimental results on a new evaluation dataset show the effectiveness of
the proposed models and allow us to understand their limitation
Target Type Identification for Entity-Bearing Queries
Identifying the target types of entity-bearing queries can help improve
retrieval performance as well as the overall search experience. In this work,
we address the problem of automatically detecting the target types of a query
with respect to a type taxonomy. We propose a supervised learning approach with
a rich variety of features. Using a purpose-built test collection, we show that
our approach outperforms existing methods by a remarkable margin. This is an
extended version of the article published with the same title in the
Proceedings of SIGIR'17.Comment: Extended version of SIGIR'17 short paper, 5 page
Living Knowledge
Diversity, especially manifested in language and knowledge, is a function of local goals, needs, competences, beliefs, culture, opinions and personal experience. The Living Knowledge project considers diversity as an asset rather than a problem. With the project, foundational ideas emerged from the synergic contribution of different disciplines, methodologies (with which many partners were previously unfamiliar) and technologies flowed in concrete diversity-aware applications such as the Future Predictor and the Media Content Analyser providing users with better structured information while coping with Web scale complexities. The key notions of diversity, fact, opinion and bias have been defined in relation to three methodologies: Media Content Analysis (MCA) which operates from a social sciences perspective; Multimodal Genre Analysis (MGA) which operates from a semiotic perspective and Facet Analysis (FA) which operates from a knowledge representation and organization perspective. A conceptual architecture that pulls all of them together has become the core of the tools for automatic extraction and the way they interact. In particular, the conceptual architecture has been implemented with the Media Content Analyser application. The scientific and technological results obtained are described in the following
Report on the XBase Project
This project addressed the conceptual fundamentals of data storage,
investigating techniques for provision of highly generic storage facilities
that can be tailored to produce various individually customised storage
infrastructures, compliant to the needs of particular applications. This
requires the separation of mechanism and policy wherever possible. Aspirations
include: actors, whether users or individual processes, should be able to bind
to, update and manipulate data and programs transparently with respect to their
respective locations; programs should be expressed independently of the storage
and network technology involved in their execution; storage facilities should
be structure-neutral so that actors can impose multiple interpretations over
information, simultaneously and safely; information should not be discarded so
that arbitrary historical views are supported; raw stored information should be
open to all; where security restrictions on its use are required this should be
achieved using cryptographic techniques. The key advances of the research were:
1) the identification of a candidate set of minimal storage system building
blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid encapsulating policy where it
cannot be customised by applications, and composable to build highly flexible
storage architectures 2) insight into the nature of append-only storage
components, and the issues arising from their application to common storage
use-cases
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