The State-of-the-arts in Focused Search

The continuous influx of various text data on the Web requires search engines to improve their retrieval abilities for more specific information. The need for relevant results to a user’s topic of interest has gone beyond search for domain or type specific documents to more focused result (e.g. document fragments or answers to a query). The introduction of XML provides a format standard for data representation, storage, and exchange. It helps focused search to be carried out at different granularities of a structured document with XML markups. This report aims at reviewing the state-of-the-arts in focused search, particularly techniques for topic-specific document retrieval, passage retrieval, XML retrieval, and entity ranking. It is concluded with highlight of open problems

The INEX 2010 Interactive Track: An Overview

In the paper we present the organization of the INEX 2010 interactive track. For the 2010 experiments the iTrack has gathered data on user search behavior in a collection consisting of book metadata taken from the online bookstore Amazon and the social cataloguing application LibraryThing. The collected data represents traditional bibliographic metadata, user-generated tags and reviews and promotional texts and reviews from publishers and professional reviewers. In this year’s experiments we designed two search task categories, which were set to represent two different stages of work task processes. In addition we let the users create a task of their own, which is used as a control task. In the paper we describe the methods used for data collection and the tasks performed by the participants

Overview of the INEX 2009 Interactive Track

In the paper we present the organization of the INEX 2009 interactive track. For the 2009 experiments the iTrack has gathered data on user search behavior in a collection consisting of book metadata taken from the online bookstore Amazon and the social cataloguing application LibraryThing. Thus the data are more structured than in previous years’ experiments, consisting of traditional bibliographic metadata, user-generated tags and reviews and promotional texts and reviews from publishers and professional reviewers. Through monitoring searches based on three different task types the experiment aims at studying how users interact with highly structured data. We describe the methods used for data collection and the tasks performed by the participants. Some preliminary results of the interaction analysis are reported

Entity Query Feature Expansion Using Knowledge Base Links

Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data. We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text expansion approaches

Overview of the INEX 2014 Interactive Social Book Search Track

Abstract. Users looking for books online are confronted with both pro-fessional meta-data and user-generated content. The goal of the Interac-tive Social Book Search Track was to investigate how users used these two sources of information, when looking for books in a leisure context. To this end participants recruited by four teams performed two different tasks using one of two book-search interfaces. Additionally one of the two interfaces also investigated whether user performance can be improved by providing a user-interface that supports multiple search stages.

A survey on tree matching and XML retrieval

International audienceWith the increasing number of available XML documents, numerous approaches for retrieval have been proposed in the literature. They usually use the tree representation of documents and queries to process them, whether in an implicit or explicit way. Although retrieving XML documents can be considered as a tree matching problem between the query tree and the document trees, only a few approaches take advantage of the algorithms and methods proposed by the graph theory. In this paper, we aim at studying the theoretical approaches proposed in the literature for tree matching and at seeing how these approaches have been adapted to XML querying and retrieval, from both an exact and an approximate matching perspective. This study will allow us to highlight theoretical aspects of graph theory that have not been yet explored in XML retrieval