1,958 research outputs found
Utilizing sub-topical structure of documents for information retrieval.
Text segmentation in natural language processing typically refers to the process of decomposing a document into constituent subtopics. Our work centers on the application of text segmentation techniques within information retrieval (IR) tasks. For example, for scoring a document by combining the retrieval scores of its constituent segments, exploiting the proximity of query terms in documents for ad-hoc search, and for question answering (QA), where retrieved passages from multiple documents are aggregated and presented as a single document to a searcher. Feedback in ad hoc IR task is shown to beneïŹt from the use of extracted sentences instead of terms from the pseudo relevant documents for query expansion. Retrieval effectiveness for patent prior art search task is enhanced by applying text segmentation to the patent queries. Another aspect of our work involves augmenting text segmentation techniques to produce segments which are more readable with less unresolved anaphora. This is particularly useful for QA and snippet generation tasks where the objective is to aggregate relevant and novel information from multiple documents satisfying user information need on one hand, and ensuring that the automatically generated content presented to the user is easily readable without reference to the original source document
The State-of-the-arts in Focused Search
The continuous influx of various text data on the Web requires search engines to improve their retrieval abilities for more specific information. The need for relevant results to a userâs topic of interest has gone beyond search for domain or type specific documents to more focused result (e.g. document fragments or answers to a query). The introduction of XML provides a format standard for data representation, storage, and exchange. It helps focused search to be carried out at different granularities of a structured document with XML markups. This report aims at reviewing the state-of-the-arts in focused search, particularly techniques for topic-specific document retrieval, passage retrieval, XML retrieval, and entity ranking. It is concluded with highlight of open problems
TopSig: Topology Preserving Document Signatures
Performance comparisons between File Signatures and Inverted Files for text
retrieval have previously shown several significant shortcomings of file
signatures relative to inverted files. The inverted file approach underpins
most state-of-the-art search engine algorithms, such as Language and
Probabilistic models. It has been widely accepted that traditional file
signatures are inferior alternatives to inverted files. This paper describes
TopSig, a new approach to the construction of file signatures. Many advances in
semantic hashing and dimensionality reduction have been made in recent times,
but these were not so far linked to general purpose, signature file based,
search engines. This paper introduces a different signature file approach that
builds upon and extends these recent advances. We are able to demonstrate
significant improvements in the performance of signature file based indexing
and retrieval, performance that is comparable to that of state of the art
inverted file based systems, including Language models and BM25. These findings
suggest that file signatures offer a viable alternative to inverted files in
suitable settings and from the theoretical perspective it positions the file
signatures model in the class of Vector Space retrieval models.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, CIKM 201
Enhanced information retrieval using domain-specific recommender models
The objective of an information retrieval (IR) system is to retrieve relevant items which meet a user information need. There is currently significant interest in personalized IR which seeks to improve IR effectiveness by incorporating a model of the userâs interests. However, in some situations
there may be no opportunity to learn about the interests of a specific user on a certain topic. In our work, we propose an IR approach which combines a recommender algorithm with IR methods to improve retrieval for domains where the system has no opportunity to learn prior information about the userâs knowledge of a domain for which they have not previously entered a query. We use search data from other previous users interested in the same topic to build a
recommender model for this topic. When a user enters a query on a topic, new to this user, an appropriate recommender model is selected and used to predict a ranking which the user may find interesting based on the behaviour of previous
users with similar queries. The recommender output is integrated with a standard IR method in a weighted linear combination to provide a final result for the user. Experiments using the INEX 2009 data collection with a simulated recommender training set show that our approach can improve on a baseline IR system
Pairwise similarity of TopSig document signatures
This paper analyses the pairwise distances of signatures produced by the TopSig retrieval model on two document collections. The distribution of the distances are compared to purely random signatures. It explains why TopSig is only competitive with state of the art retrieval models at early precision. Only the local neighbourhood of the signatures is interpretable. We suggest this is a common property of vector space models
Exploiting Query Structure and Document Structure to Improve Document Retrieval Effectiveness
In this paper we present a systematic analysis of document
retrieval using unstructured and structured queries within
the score region algebra (SRA) structured retrieval framework. The behavior of diÂźerent retrieval models, namely
Boolean, tf.idf, GPX, language models, and Okapi, is tested
using the transparent SRA framework in our three-level structured retrieval system called TIJAH. The retrieval models are implemented along four elementary retrieval aspects: element and term selection, element score computation, score combination, and score propagation.
The analysis is performed on a numerous experiments
evaluated on TREC and CLEF collections, using manually
generated unstructured and structured queries. Unstructured queries range from the short title queries to long title
+ description + narrative queries. For generating structured
queries we exploit the knowledge of the document structure
and the content used to semantically describe or classify
documents. We show that such structured information can
be utilized in retrieval engines to give more precise answers to user queries then when using unstructured queries
Fixed versus Dynamic Co-Occurrence Windows in TextRank Term Weights for Information Retrieval
TextRank is a variant of PageRank typically used in graphs that represent
documents, and where vertices denote terms and edges denote relations between
terms. Quite often the relation between terms is simple term co-occurrence
within a fixed window of k terms. The output of TextRank when applied
iteratively is a score for each vertex, i.e. a term weight, that can be used
for information retrieval (IR) just like conventional term frequency based term
weights. So far, when computing TextRank term weights over co- occurrence
graphs, the window of term co-occurrence is al- ways ?xed. This work departs
from this, and considers dy- namically adjusted windows of term co-occurrence
that fol- low the document structure on a sentence- and paragraph- level. The
resulting TextRank term weights are used in a ranking function that re-ranks
1000 initially returned search results in order to improve the precision of the
ranking. Ex- periments with two IR collections show that adjusting the vicinity
of term co-occurrence when computing TextRank term weights can lead to gains in
early precision
Entity Query Feature Expansion Using Knowledge Base Links
Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base
construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and
query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large
general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google
Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity
annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open
research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to
improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion
approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this
paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature
expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from
entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured
attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity
annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC
text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity
links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data.
We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant
improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text
expansion approaches
PFTijah: text search in an XML database system
This paper introduces the PFTijah system, a text search system that is integrated with an XML/XQuery database management system. We present examples of its use, we explain some of the system internals, and discuss plans for future work. PFTijah is part of the open source release of MonetDB/XQuery
- âŠ