177 research outputs found
TNO/UT at TREC-9: How different are Web documents?
Although at first sight, the web track might seem a copy of the ad hoc track, we discovered that some small adjustments had to be made to our systems to run the web evaluation. As we expected, the basic language model based IR model worked effectively on this data. Blind feedback methods however, seem less effective on web data. We also experimented with rescoring the documents based on several algorithms that exploit link information. These methods yielded no positive result
A new weighting scheme and discriminative approach for information retrieval in static and dynamic document collections
This paper introduces a new weighting scheme in information retrieval. It also proposes using the document centroid as a threshold for normalizing documents in a document collection. Document centroid normalization helps to achieve more effective information retrieval as it enables good discrimination between documents. In the context of a machine learning application, namely unsupervised document indexing and retrieval, we compared the effectiveness of the proposed weighting scheme to the 'Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency' or TF-IDF, which is commonly used and considered as one of the best existing weighting schemes. The paper shows how the document centroid is used to remove less significant weights from documents and how this helps to achieve better retrieval effectiveness. Most of the existing weighting schemes in information retrieval research assume that the whole document collection is static. The results presented in this paper show that the proposed weighting scheme can produce higher retrieval effectiveness compared with the TF-IDF weighting scheme, in both static and dynamic document collections. The results also show the variation in information retrieval effectiveness that is achieved for static and dynamic document collections by using a specific weighting scheme. This type of comparison has not been presented in the literature before
Improving Term Frequency Normalization for Multi-topical Documents, and Application to Language Modeling Approaches
Term frequency normalization is a serious issue since lengths of documents
are various. Generally, documents become long due to two different reasons -
verbosity and multi-topicality. First, verbosity means that the same topic is
repeatedly mentioned by terms related to the topic, so that term frequency is
more increased than the well-summarized one. Second, multi-topicality indicates
that a document has a broad discussion of multi-topics, rather than single
topic. Although these document characteristics should be differently handled,
all previous methods of term frequency normalization have ignored these
differences and have used a simplified length-driven approach which decreases
the term frequency by only the length of a document, causing an unreasonable
penalization. To attack this problem, we propose a novel TF normalization
method which is a type of partially-axiomatic approach. We first formulate two
formal constraints that the retrieval model should satisfy for documents having
verbose and multi-topicality characteristic, respectively. Then, we modify
language modeling approaches to better satisfy these two constraints, and
derive novel smoothing methods. Experimental results show that the proposed
method increases significantly the precision for keyword queries, and
substantially improves MAP (Mean Average Precision) for verbose queries.Comment: 8 pages, conference paper, published in ECIR '0
Part of Speech Based Term Weighting for Information Retrieval
Automatic language processing tools typically assign to terms so-called
weights corresponding to the contribution of terms to information content.
Traditionally, term weights are computed from lexical statistics, e.g., term
frequencies. We propose a new type of term weight that is computed from part of
speech (POS) n-gram statistics. The proposed POS-based term weight represents
how informative a term is in general, based on the POS contexts in which it
generally occurs in language. We suggest five different computations of
POS-based term weights by extending existing statistical approximations of term
information measures. We apply these POS-based term weights to information
retrieval, by integrating them into the model that matches documents to
queries. Experiments with two TREC collections and 300 queries, using TF-IDF &
BM25 as baselines, show that integrating our POS-based term weights to
retrieval always leads to gains (up to +33.7% from the baseline). Additional
experiments with a different retrieval model as baseline (Language Model with
Dirichlet priors smoothing) and our best performing POS-based term weight, show
retrieval gains always and consistently across the whole smoothing range of the
baseline
Setting per-field normalisation hyper-parameters for the named-page finding search task
Per-field normalisation has been shown to be effective for Web search tasks, e.g. named-page finding. However, per-field normalisation also suffers from having hyper-parameters to tune on a per-field basis. In this paper, we argue that the purpose of per-field normalisation is to adjust the linear relationship between field length and term frequency. We experiment with standard Web test collections, using three document fields, namely the body of the document, its title, and the anchor text of its incoming links. From our experiments, we find that across different collections, the linear correlation values, given by the optimised hyper-parameter settings, are proportional to the maximum negative linear correlation. Based on this observation, we devise an automatic method for setting the per-field normalisation hyper-parameter values without the use of relevance assessment for tuning. According to the evaluation results, this method is shown to be effective for the body and title fields. In addition, the difficulty in setting the per-field normalisation hyper-parameter for the anchor text field is explained
Data-driven Job Search Engine Using Skills and Company Attribute Filters
According to a report online, more than 200 million unique users search for
jobs online every month. This incredibly large and fast growing demand has
enticed software giants such as Google and Facebook to enter this space, which
was previously dominated by companies such as LinkedIn, Indeed and
CareerBuilder. Recently, Google released their "AI-powered Jobs Search Engine",
"Google For Jobs" while Facebook released "Facebook Jobs" within their
platform. These current job search engines and platforms allow users to search
for jobs based on general narrow filters such as job title, date posted,
experience level, company and salary. However, they have severely limited
filters relating to skill sets such as C++, Python, and Java and company
related attributes such as employee size, revenue, technographics and
micro-industries. These specialized filters can help applicants and companies
connect at a very personalized, relevant and deeper level. In this paper we
present a framework that provides an end-to-end "Data-driven Jobs Search
Engine". In addition, users can also receive potential contacts of recruiters
and senior positions for connection and networking opportunities. The high
level implementation of the framework is described as follows: 1) Collect job
postings data in the United States, 2) Extract meaningful tokens from the
postings data using ETL pipelines, 3) Normalize the data set to link company
names to their specific company websites, 4) Extract and ranking the skill
sets, 5) Link the company names and websites to their respective company level
attributes with the EVERSTRING Company API, 6) Run user-specific search queries
on the database to identify relevant job postings and 7) Rank the job search
results. This framework offers a highly customizable and highly targeted search
experience for end users.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, ICDM 201
Enhancing Content-And-Structure Information Retrieval using a Native XML Database
Three approaches to content-and-structure XML retrieval are analysed in this
paper: first by using Zettair, a full-text information retrieval system; second
by using eXist, a native XML database, and third by using a hybrid XML
retrieval system that uses eXist to produce the final answers from likely
relevant articles retrieved by Zettair. INEX 2003 content-and-structure topics
can be classified in two categories: the first retrieving full articles as
final answers, and the second retrieving more specific elements within articles
as final answers. We show that for both topic categories our initial hybrid
system improves the retrieval effectiveness of a native XML database. For
ranking the final answer elements, we propose and evaluate a novel retrieval
model that utilises the structural relationships between the answer elements of
a native XML database and retrieves Coherent Retrieval Elements. The final
results of our experiments show that when the XML retrieval task focusses on
highly relevant elements our hybrid XML retrieval system with the Coherent
Retrieval Elements module is 1.8 times more effective than Zettair and 3 times
more effective than eXist, and yields an effective content-and-structure XML
retrieval
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