4,198 research outputs found
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
Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning
While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every
day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for
non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are
suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data
by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval
system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our
model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict
relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during
training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly
outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and
Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some
examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short
Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)
This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies
Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for
Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user
support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources
including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate
and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from
retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct
user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of
concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion.
The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in
the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first
phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept
derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with
user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the
design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase
entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system.
The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from
sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach
provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in
turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept
hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The
extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With
respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for
viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are
outlined
Disambiguation strategies for cross-language information retrieval
This paper gives an overview of tools and methods for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that are developed within the Twenty-One project. The tools and methods are evaluated with the TREC CLIR task document collection using Dutch queries on the English document base. The main issue addressed here is an evaluation of two approaches to disambiguation. The underlying question is whether a lot of effort should be put in finding the correct translation for each query term before searching, or whether searching with more than one possible translation leads to better results? The experimental study suggests that the quality of search methods is more important than the quality of disambiguation methods. Good retrieval methods are able to disambiguate translated queries implicitly during searching
DCU@TRECMed 2012: Using ad-hoc baselines for domain-specific retrieval
This paper describes the first participation of DCU in the TREC Medical Records Track (TRECMed). We performed some initial experiments on the 2011 TRECMed data based on the BM25 retrieval model. Surprisingly, we found that the standard BM25 model with default parameters, performs comparable to the best automatic runs submitted to TRECMed 2011 and would have resulted in rank four out of 29 participating groups. We expected that some form of domain adaptation would increase performance. However, results on the 2011 data proved otherwise: concept-based query expansion decreased performance, and filtering and reranking by term proximity also decreased performance slightly. We submitted four runs based on the BM25 retrieval model to TRECMed 2012 using standard BM25, standard query expansion, result filtering, and concept-based query expansion. Official results for 2012 confirm that domain-specific knowledge does not increase performance compared to the BM25 baseline as applied by us
Creating a test collection to evaluate diversity in image retrieval
This paper describes the adaptation of an existing test collection
for image retrieval to enable diversity in the results set to be
measured. Previous research has shown that a more diverse set of
results often satisfies the needs of more users better than standard
document rankings. To enable diversity to be quantified, it is
necessary to classify images relevant to a given theme to one or
more sub-topics or clusters. We describe the challenges in
building (as far as we are aware) the first test collection for
evaluating diversity in image retrieval. This includes selecting
appropriate topics, creating sub-topics, and quantifying the overall
effectiveness of a retrieval system. A total of 39 topics were
augmented for cluster-based relevance and we also provide an
initial analysis of assessor agreement for grouping relevant
images into sub-topics or clusters
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