19,448 research outputs found
Learning to Rank Academic Experts in the DBLP Dataset
Expert finding is an information retrieval task that is concerned with the
search for the most knowledgeable people with respect to a specific topic, and
the search is based on documents that describe people's activities. The task
involves taking a user query as input and returning a list of people who are
sorted by their level of expertise with respect to the user query. Despite
recent interest in the area, the current state-of-the-art techniques lack in
principled approaches for optimally combining different sources of evidence.
This article proposes two frameworks for combining multiple estimators of
expertise. These estimators are derived from textual contents, from
graph-structure of the citation patterns for the community of experts, and from
profile information about the experts. More specifically, this article explores
the use of supervised learning to rank methods, as well as rank aggregation
approaches, for combing all of the estimators of expertise. Several supervised
learning algorithms, which are representative of the pointwise, pairwise and
listwise approaches, were tested, and various state-of-the-art data fusion
techniques were also explored for the rank aggregation framework. Experiments
that were performed on a dataset of academic publications from the Computer
Science domain attest the adequacy of the proposed approaches.Comment: Expert Systems, 2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1302.041
Bayes Merging of Multiple Vocabularies for Scalable Image Retrieval
The Bag-of-Words (BoW) representation is well applied to recent
state-of-the-art image retrieval works. Typically, multiple vocabularies are
generated to correct quantization artifacts and improve recall. However, this
routine is corrupted by vocabulary correlation, i.e., overlapping among
different vocabularies. Vocabulary correlation leads to an over-counting of the
indexed features in the overlapped area, or the intersection set, thus
compromising the retrieval accuracy. In order to address the correlation
problem while preserve the benefit of high recall, this paper proposes a Bayes
merging approach to down-weight the indexed features in the intersection set.
Through explicitly modeling the correlation problem in a probabilistic view, a
joint similarity on both image- and feature-level is estimated for the indexed
features in the intersection set.
We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on three benchmark
datasets. Albeit simple, Bayes merging can be well applied in various merging
tasks, and consistently improves the baselines on multi-vocabulary merging.
Moreover, Bayes merging is efficient in terms of both time and memory cost, and
yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, accepted to CVPR 201
An LSH Index for Computing Kendall's Tau over Top-k Lists
We consider the problem of similarity search within a set of top-k lists
under the Kendall's Tau distance function. This distance describes how related
two rankings are in terms of concordantly and discordantly ordered items. As
top-k lists are usually very short compared to the global domain of possible
items to be ranked, creating an inverted index to look up overlapping lists is
possible but does not capture tight enough the similarity measure. In this
work, we investigate locality sensitive hashing schemes for the Kendall's Tau
distance and evaluate the proposed methods using two real-world datasets.Comment: 6 pages, 8 subfigures, presented in Seventeenth International
Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB 2014) co-located with ACM SIGMOD201
Unsupervised Graph-based Rank Aggregation for Improved Retrieval
This paper presents a robust and comprehensive graph-based rank aggregation
approach, used to combine results of isolated ranker models in retrieval tasks.
The method follows an unsupervised scheme, which is independent of how the
isolated ranks are formulated. Our approach is able to combine arbitrary
models, defined in terms of different ranking criteria, such as those based on
textual, image or hybrid content representations.
We reformulate the ad-hoc retrieval problem as a document retrieval based on
fusion graphs, which we propose as a new unified representation model capable
of merging multiple ranks and expressing inter-relationships of retrieval
results automatically. By doing so, we claim that the retrieval system can
benefit from learning the manifold structure of datasets, thus leading to more
effective results. Another contribution is that our graph-based aggregation
formulation, unlike existing approaches, allows for encapsulating contextual
information encoded from multiple ranks, which can be directly used for
ranking, without further computations and post-processing steps over the
graphs. Based on the graphs, a novel similarity retrieval score is formulated
using an efficient computation of minimum common subgraphs. Finally, another
benefit over existing approaches is the absence of hyperparameters.
A comprehensive experimental evaluation was conducted considering diverse
well-known public datasets, composed of textual, image, and multimodal
documents. Performed experiments demonstrate that our method reaches top
performance, yielding better effectiveness scores than state-of-the-art
baseline methods and promoting large gains over the rankers being fused, thus
demonstrating the successful capability of the proposal in representing queries
based on a unified graph-based model of rank fusions
Off the Beaten Path: Let's Replace Term-Based Retrieval with k-NN Search
Retrieval pipelines commonly rely on a term-based search to obtain candidate
records, which are subsequently re-ranked. Some candidates are missed by this
approach, e.g., due to a vocabulary mismatch. We address this issue by
replacing the term-based search with a generic k-NN retrieval algorithm, where
a similarity function can take into account subtle term associations. While an
exact brute-force k-NN search using this similarity function is slow, we
demonstrate that an approximate algorithm can be nearly two orders of magnitude
faster at the expense of only a small loss in accuracy. A retrieval pipeline
using an approximate k-NN search can be more effective and efficient than the
term-based pipeline. This opens up new possibilities for designing effective
retrieval pipelines. Our software (including data-generating code) and
derivative data based on the Stack Overflow collection is available online
Toward Entity-Aware Search
As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability
Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Computing Kemeny Scores - Theory and Practice
The central problem in this work is to compute a ranking of a set of elements
which is "closest to" a given set of input rankings of the elements. We define
"closest to" in an established way as having the minimum sum of Kendall-Tau
distances to each input ranking. Unfortunately, the resulting problem Kemeny
consensus is NP-hard for instances with n input rankings, n being an even
integer greater than three. Nevertheless this problem plays a central role in
many rank aggregation problems. It was shown that one can compute the
corresponding Kemeny consensus list in f(k) + poly(n) time, being f(k) a
computable function in one of the parameters "score of the consensus", "maximum
distance between two input rankings", "number of candidates" and "average
pairwise Kendall-Tau distance" and poly(n) a polynomial in the input size. This
work will demonstrate the practical usefulness of the corresponding algorithms
by applying them to randomly generated and several real-world data. Thus, we
show that these fixed-parameter algorithms are not only of theoretical
interest. In a more theoretical part of this work we will develop an improved
fixed-parameter algorithm for the parameter "score of the consensus" having a
better upper bound for the running time than previous algorithms.Comment: Studienarbei
- …