Investigating the Effects of Exploratory Semantic Search on the Use of a Museum Archive

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in how new technologies can support the more effective use of online museum content. Two particularly relevant developments are exploratory search and semantic web technologies. Exploratory search tools support a more undirected and serendipitous interaction with the content. Semantic web technology, when applied in this context, allows the exploitation of metadata and ontologies to provide more intelligent support for user interaction. Bletchley Park Text is a museum web application supporting a semantic driven, exploratory approach to the search and navigation of digital museum resources. Bletchley Park Text uses semantics to organise selected content (i.e. stories) into a number of composite pages that illustrate conceptual patterns in the content, and from which the content itself can be accessed. The use made of Bletchley Park Text over an eight month period was analysed in order to understand the kinds of trajectories across the available resources that users could make with such a system. The results identified two distinct strategies of exploratory search. A risky strategy was characterised as incorporating: conceptual jumps between successive queries, a larger number of shorter queries and the use of the stories themselves to acclimatise to a new set of search results. A cautious strategy was characterised as incorporating: small conceptual shifts between queries, a smaller number of longer queries and the use of composite pages to acclimatise to a set of new search results. These findings have implications for the intelligent scaffolding of exploratory search

Web Page Retrieval by Combining Evidence

The participation of the REINA Research Group in WebCLEF 2005 focused in the monolingual mixed task. Queries or topics are of two types: named and home pages. For both, we first perform a search by thematic contents; for the same query, we do a search in several elements of information from every page (title, some meta tags, anchor text) and then we combine the results. For queries about home pages, we try to detect using a method based in some keywords and their patterns of use. After, a re-rank of the results of the thematic contents retrieval is performed, based on Page-Rank and Centrality coeficients

Towards Streaming Evaluation of Queries with Correlation in Complex Event Processing

Complex event processing (CEP) has gained a lot of attention for evaluating complex patterns over high-throughput data streams. Recently, new algorithms for the evaluation of CEP patterns have emerged with strong guarantees of efficiency, i.e. constant update-time per tuple and constant-delay enumeration. Unfortunately, these techniques are restricted for patterns with local filters, limiting the possibility of using joins for correlating the data of events that are far apart. In this paper, we embark on the search for efficient evaluation algorithms of CEP patterns with joins. We start by formalizing the so-called partition-by operator, a standard operator in data stream management systems to correlate contiguous events on streams. Although this operator is a restricted version of a join query, we show that partition-by (without iteration) is equally expressive as hierarchical queries, the biggest class of full conjunctive queries that can be evaluated with constant update-time and constant-delay enumeration over streams. To evaluate queries with partition-by we introduce an automata model, called chain complex event automata (chain-CEA), an extension of complex event automata that can compare data values by using equalities and disequalities. We show that this model admits determinization and is expressive enough to capture queries with partition-by. More importantly, we provide an algorithm with constant update time and constant delay enumeration for evaluating any query definable by chain-CEA, showing that all CEP queries with partition-by can be evaluated with these strong guarantees of efficiency

Towards Query Logs for Privacy Studies: On Deriving Search Queries from Questions

Translating verbose information needs into crisp search queries is a phenomenon that is ubiquitous but hardly understood. Insights into this process could be valuable in several applications, including synthesizing large privacy-friendly query logs from public Web sources which are readily available to the academic research community. In this work, we take a step towards understanding query formulation by tapping into the rich potential of community question answering (CQA) forums. Specifically, we sample natural language (NL) questions spanning diverse themes from the Stack Exchange platform, and conduct a large-scale conversion experiment where crowdworkers submit search queries they would use when looking for equivalent information. We provide a careful analysis of this data, accounting for possible sources of bias during conversion, along with insights into user-specific linguistic patterns and search behaviors. We release a dataset of 7,000 question-query pairs from this study to facilitate further research on query understanding.Comment: ECIR 2020 Short Pape

Deeper Text Understanding for IR with Contextual Neural Language Modeling

Neural networks provide new possibilities to automatically learn complex language patterns and query-document relations. Neural IR models have achieved promising results in learning query-document relevance patterns, but few explorations have been done on understanding the text content of a query or a document. This paper studies leveraging a recently-proposed contextual neural language model, BERT, to provide deeper text understanding for IR. Experimental results demonstrate that the contextual text representations from BERT are more effective than traditional word embeddings. Compared to bag-of-words retrieval models, the contextual language model can better leverage language structures, bringing large improvements on queries written in natural languages. Combining the text understanding ability with search knowledge leads to an enhanced pre-trained BERT model that can benefit related search tasks where training data are limited.Comment: In proceedings of SIGIR 201

Web Query Reformulation via Joint Modeling of Latent Topic Dependency and Term Context

An important way to improve users’ satisfaction in Web search is to assist them by issuing more effective queries. One such approach is query reformulation, which generates new queries according to the current query issued by users. A common procedure for conducting reformulation is to generate some candidate queries first, then a scoring method is employed to assess these candidates. Currently, most of the existing methods are context based. They rely heavily on the context relation of terms in the history queries and cannot detect and maintain the semantic consistency of queries. In this article, we propose a graphical model to score queries. The proposed model exploits a latent topic space, which is automatically derived from the query log, to detect semantic dependency of terms in a query and dependency among topics. Meanwhile, the graphical model also captures the term context in the history query by skip-bigram and n-gram language models. In addition, our model can be easily extended to consider users’ history search interests when we conduct query reformulation for different users. In the task of candidate query generation, we investigate a social tagging data resource—Delicious bookmark—to generate addition and substitution patterns that are employed as supplements to the patterns generated from query log data