A New Approach to Query Segmentation for Relevance Ranking in Web Search

Abstract In this paper, we try to determine how best to improve state-ofthe-art methods for relevance ranking in web searching by query segmentation. Query segmentation is meant to separate the input query into segments, typically natural language phrases. We propose employing the re-ranking approach in query segmentation, which first employs a generative model to create the top k candidates and then employs a discriminative model to re-rank the candidates to obtain the final segmentation result. The method has been widely utilized for structure prediction in natural language processing, but has not been applied to query segmentation, as far as we know. Furthermore, we propose a new method for using the results of query segmentation in relevance ranking, which takes both the original query words and the segmented query phrases as units of query representation. We investigate whether our method can improve three relevance models, namely n-gram BM25, key n-gram model and term dependency model, within the framework of learning to rank. Our experimental results on large scale web search datasets show that our method can indeed significantly improve relevance ranking in all three cases

Learning Visual Features from Snapshots for Web Search

When applying learning to rank algorithms to Web search, a large number of features are usually designed to capture the relevance signals. Most of these features are computed based on the extracted textual elements, link analysis, and user logs. However, Web pages are not solely linked texts, but have structured layout organizing a large variety of elements in different styles. Such layout itself can convey useful visual information, indicating the relevance of a Web page. For example, the query-independent layout (i.e., raw page layout) can help identify the page quality, while the query-dependent layout (i.e., page rendered with matched query words) can further tell rich structural information (e.g., size, position and proximity) of the matching signals. However, such visual information of layout has been seldom utilized in Web search in the past. In this work, we propose to learn rich visual features automatically from the layout of Web pages (i.e., Web page snapshots) for relevance ranking. Both query-independent and query-dependent snapshots are considered as the new inputs. We then propose a novel visual perception model inspired by human's visual search behaviors on page viewing to extract the visual features. This model can be learned end-to-end together with traditional human-crafted features. We also show that such visual features can be efficiently acquired in the online setting with an extended inverted indexing scheme. Experiments on benchmark collections demonstrate that learning visual features from Web page snapshots can significantly improve the performance of relevance ranking in ad-hoc Web retrieval tasks.Comment: CIKM 201

Dublin City University video track experiments for TREC 2003

In this paper, we describe our experiments for both the News Story Segmentation task and Interactive Search task for TRECVID 2003. Our News Story Segmentation task involved the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to combine evidence from audio-visual analysis tools in order to generate a listing of news stories from a given news programme. Our Search task experiment compared a video retrieval system based on text, image and relevance feedback with a text-only video retrieval system in order to identify which was more effective. In order to do so we developed two variations of our Físchlár video retrieval system and conducted user testing in a controlled lab environment. In this paper we outline our work on both of these two tasks

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Filtered-page ranking: uma abordagem para ranqueamento de documentos HTML previamente filtrados

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação, Florianópolis, 2016.Algoritmos de ranking de páginas Web podem ser criados usando técnicas baseadas em elementos estruturais da página Web, em segmentação da página ou na busca personalizada. Esta pesquisa aborda um método de ranking de documentos previamente filtrados, que segmenta a página Web em blocos de três categorias para delas eliminar conteúdo irrelevante. O método de ranking proposto, chamado Filtered-Page Ranking (FPR), consta de duas etapas principais: (i) segmentação da página web e eliminação de conteúdo irrelevante e (ii) ranking de páginas Web. O foco da extração de conteúdo irrelevante é eliminar conteúdos não relacionados à consulta do usuário, através do algoritmo proposto Query-Based Blocks Mining (QBM), para que o ranking considere somente conteúdo relevante. O foco da etapa de ranking é calcular quão relevante cada página Web é para determinada consulta, usando critérios considerados em estudos de recuperação da informação. Com a presente pesquisa pretende-se demonstrar que o QBM extrai eficientemente o conteúdo irrelevante e que os critérios utilizados para calcular quão próximo uma página Web é da consulta são relevantes, produzindo uma média de resultados de ranking de páginas Web de qualidade melhor que a do clássico modelo vetorial.Abstract : Web page ranking algorithms can be created using content-based, structure-based or user search-based techniques. This research addresses an user search-based approach applied over previously filtered documents ranking, which relies in a segmentation process to extract irrelevante content from documents before ranking. The process splits the document into three categories of blocks in order to fragment the document and eliminate irrelevante content. The ranking method, called Page Filtered Ranking, has two main steps: (i) irrelevante content extraction; and (ii) document ranking. The focus of the extraction step is to eliminate irrelevante content from the document, by means of the Query-Based Blocks Mining algorithm, creating a tree that is evaluated in the ranking process. During the ranking step, the focus is to calculate the relevance of each document for a given query, using criteria that give importance to specific parts of the document and to the highlighted features of some HTML elements. Our proposal is compared to two baselines: the classic vectorial model, and the CETR noise removal algorithm, and the results demonstrate that our irrelevante content removal algorithm improves the results and our relevance criteria are relevant to the process

Attribute-Graph: A Graph based approach to Image Ranking

We propose a novel image representation, termed Attribute-Graph, to rank images by their semantic similarity to a given query image. An Attribute-Graph is an undirected fully connected graph, incorporating both local and global image characteristics. The graph nodes characterise objects as well as the overall scene context using mid-level semantic attributes, while the edges capture the object topology. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Attribute-Graphs by applying them to the problem of image ranking. We benchmark the performance of our algorithm on the 'rPascal' and 'rImageNet' datasets, which we have created in order to evaluate the ranking performance on complex queries containing multiple objects. Our experimental evaluation shows that modelling images as Attribute-Graphs results in improved ranking performance over existing techniques.Comment: In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 201