Evaluating the implicit feedback models for adaptive video retrieval

Interactive video retrieval systems are becoming popular. On the one hand, these systems try to reduce the effect of the semantic gap, an issue currently being addressed by the multimedia retrieval community. On the other hand, such systems enhance the quality of information seeking for the user by supporting query formulation and reformulation. Interactive systems are very popular in the textual retrieval domain. However, they are relatively unexplored in the case of multimedia retrieval. The main problem in the development of interactive retrieval systems is the evaluation cost.The traditional evaluation methodology, as used in the information retrieval domain, is not applicable. An alternative is to use a user-centred evaluation methodology. However, such schemes are expensive in terms of effort, cost and are not scalable. This problem gets exacerbated by the use of implicit indicators, which are useful and increasingly used in predicting user intentions. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of a number of interfaces and feedback mechanisms and compare their relative performance using a simulated evaluation methodology. The results show the relatively better performance of a search interface with the combination of explicit and implicit features

Boolean Query Reformulation with the Query Tree Classifier

One of the difficulties in using the current Boolean-based information retrieval systems is that it is hard for a user, especially a novice, to formulate an effective Boolean query. Query reformulation can be even more difficult and complex than formulation since the user can have difficulty in incorporating the new information gained from the previous search into his/her next query. In this research, query reformulation is viewed as a classification problem (i.e., classifying documents as either relevant or nonrelevant), and a new reformulation algorithm is proposed which builds a treestructured classifier (named the query tree) at each reformulation from a set of feedback documents retrieved from the previous search. The query tree can be easily transformed into a Boolean query. The query tree and two of the most important current query reformulation algorithms were compared on benchmark test sets (CACM. CISI, and MedJars). The query tree showed significant improvements over the current algorithms in most experiments. We attribute this improved performance to the ability of the query tree algorithm to select good search terms and to represent the relationships among search terms into a tree structure

Bridging memory-based collaborative filtering and text retrieval

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10791-012-9214-zWhen speaking of information retrieval, we often mean text retrieval. But there exist many other forms of information retrieval applications. A typical example is collaborative filtering that suggests interesting items to a user by taking into account other users’ preferences or tastes. Due to the uniqueness of the problem, it has been modeled and studied differently in the past, mainly drawing from the preference prediction and machine learning view point. A few attempts have yet been made to bring back collaborative filtering to information (text) retrieval modeling and subsequently new interesting collaborative filtering techniques have been thus derived. In this paper, we show that from the algorithmic view point, there is an even closer relationship between collaborative filtering and text retrieval. Specifically, major collaborative filtering algorithms, such as the memory-based, essentially calculate the dot product between the user vector (as the query vector in text retrieval) and the item rating vector (as the document vector in text retrieval). Thus, if we properly structure user preference data and employ the target user’s ratings as query input, major text retrieval algorithms and systems can be directly used without any modification. In this regard, we propose a unified formulation under a common notational framework for memory-based collaborative filtering, and a technique to use any text retrieval weighting function with collaborative filtering preference data. Besides confirming the rationale of the framework, our preliminary experimental results have also demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach in using text retrieval models and systems to perform item ranking tasks in collaborative filtering.This work is supported by the Spanish Government (TIN2011-28538- C02-01) and the Regional Government of Madrid (S2009TIC-1542). We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments

The relationship between IR and multimedia databases

Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient.\ud \ud Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval.\ud \ud Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database.\ud \ud First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database.\ud \ud Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer.\ud \ud Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback.\ud \ud We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing.\ud \ud We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system

Can a workspace help to overcome the query formulation problem in image retrieval?

We have proposed a novel image retrieval system that incorporates a workspace where users can organise their search results. A task-oriented and user-centred experiment has been devised involving design professionals and several types of realistic search tasks. We study the workspace’s effect on two aspects: task conceptualisation and query formulation. A traditional relevance feedback system serves as baseline. The results of this study show that the workspace is more useful with respect to both of the above aspects. The proposed approach leads to a more effective and enjoyable search experience

An adaptive technique for content-based image retrieval

We discuss an adaptive approach towards Content-Based Image Retrieval. It is based on the Ostensive Model of developing information needs—a special kind of relevance feedback model that learns from implicit user feedback and adds a temporal notion to relevance. The ostensive approach supports content-assisted browsing through visualising the interaction by adding user-selected images to a browsing path, which ends with a set of system recommendations. The suggestions are based on an adaptive query learning scheme, in which the query is learnt from previously selected images. Our approach is an adaptation of the original Ostensive Model based on textual features only, to include content-based features to characterise images. In the proposed scheme textual and colour features are combined using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combination. Results from a user-centred, work-task oriented evaluation show that the ostensive interface is preferred over a traditional interface with manual query facilities. This is due to its ability to adapt to the user's need, its intuitiveness and the fluid way in which it operates. Studying and comparing the nature of the underlying information need, it emerges that our approach elicits changes in the user's need based on the interaction, and is successful in adapting the retrieval to match the changes. In addition, a preliminary study of the retrieval performance of the ostensive relevance feedback scheme shows that it can outperform a standard relevance feedback strategy in terms of image recall in category search

An explorative study of interface support for image searching

In this paper we study interfaces for image retrieval systems. Current image retrieval interfaces are limited to providing query facilities and result presentation. The user can inspect the results and possibly provide feedback on their relevance for the current query. Our approach, in contrast, encourages the user to group and organise their search results and thus provide more fine-grained feedback for the system. It combines the search and management process, which - according to our hypothesis - helps the user to onceptualise their search tasks and to overcome the query formulation problem. An evaluation, involving young design-professionals and di®erent types of information seeking scenarios, shows that the proposed approach succeeds in encouraging the user to conceptualise their tasks and that it leads to increased user satisfaction. However, it could not be shown to increase performance. We identify the problems in the current setup, which when eliminated should lead to more effective searching overall

Reply With: Proactive Recommendation of Email Attachments

Email responses often contain items-such as a file or a hyperlink to an external document-that are attached to or included inline in the body of the message. Analysis of an enterprise email corpus reveals that 35% of the time when users include these items as part of their response, the attachable item is already present in their inbox or sent folder. A modern email client can proactively retrieve relevant attachable items from the user's past emails based on the context of the current conversation, and recommend them for inclusion, to reduce the time and effort involved in composing the response. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised learning framework for recommending attachable items to the user. As email search systems are commonly available, we constrain the recommendation task to formulating effective search queries from the context of the conversations. The query is submitted to an existing IR system to retrieve relevant items for attachment. We also present a novel strategy for generating labels from an email corpus---without the need for manual annotations---that can be used to train and evaluate the query formulation model. In addition, we describe a deep convolutional neural network that demonstrates satisfactory performance on this query formulation task when evaluated on the publicly available Avocado dataset and a proprietary dataset of internal emails obtained through an employee participation program.Comment: CIKM2017. Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 201