3,020 research outputs found
Document Translation for Cross-Language Text Retrieval at the University of Maryland
The University of Maryland participated in three TREC-6 tasks: ad hoc retrieval, cross-language retrieval, and spoken document retrieval. The principal focus of the work was evaluation of a cross-language text retrieval technique based on fully automatic machine translation. The results show that approaches based on document translation can be approximately as effective as approaches based on query translation, but that additional work will be needed to develop a solid basis for choosing between the two in specific applications. Ad hoc and spoken document retrieval results are also presented
Report on the Glasgow IR group (glair4) submission
This year's submission from the Glasgow IR group (glair4) is to the category B automatic ad hoc section. Due to pressures of time and unexpected complications, our intended application of a technique known as generalised imaging [Crestani 95] was not completed in time for the TREC deadline. Therefore, the submission is the output of an IR system running a simplistic retrieval strategy, similar to last year's submission though with some intended improvements. It would appear from comparison with other category B submissions that this strategy is relatively successful. The following sections of this report contain a description of the retrieval strategy used, a analysis of the results, and finally, a discussion of our intentions for TREC 6
Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning
While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every
day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for
non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are
suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data
by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval
system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our
model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict
relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during
training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly
outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and
Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some
examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short
EveTAR: Building a Large-Scale Multi-Task Test Collection over Arabic Tweets
This article introduces a new language-independent approach for creating a
large-scale high-quality test collection of tweets that supports multiple
information retrieval (IR) tasks without running a shared-task campaign. The
adopted approach (demonstrated over Arabic tweets) designs the collection
around significant (i.e., popular) events, which enables the development of
topics that represent frequent information needs of Twitter users for which
rich content exists. That inherently facilitates the support of multiple tasks
that generally revolve around events, namely event detection, ad-hoc search,
timeline generation, and real-time summarization. The key highlights of the
approach include diversifying the judgment pool via interactive search and
multiple manually-crafted queries per topic, collecting high-quality
annotations via crowd-workers for relevancy and in-house annotators for
novelty, filtering out low-agreement topics and inaccessible tweets, and
providing multiple subsets of the collection for better availability. Applying
our methodology on Arabic tweets resulted in EveTAR , the first
freely-available tweet test collection for multiple IR tasks. EveTAR includes a
crawl of 355M Arabic tweets and covers 50 significant events for which about
62K tweets were judged with substantial average inter-annotator agreement
(Kappa value of 0.71). We demonstrate the usability of EveTAR by evaluating
existing algorithms in the respective tasks. Results indicate that the new
collection can support reliable ranking of IR systems that is comparable to
similar TREC collections, while providing strong baseline results for future
studies over Arabic tweets
Relevance feedback for best match term weighting algorithms in information retrieval
Personalisation in full text retrieval or full text filtering implies reweighting of the query terms based on some explicit or implicit feedback from the user. Relevance feedback inputs the user's judgements on previously retrieved documents to construct a personalised query or user profile. This paper studies relevance feedback within two probabilistic models of information retrieval: the first based on statistical language models and the second based on the binary independence probabilistic model. The paper shows the resemblance of the approaches to relevance feedback of these models, introduces new approaches to relevance feedback for both models, and evaluates the new relevance feedback algorithms on the TREC collection. The paper shows that there are no significant differences between simple and sophisticated approaches to relevance feedback
On the Impact of Entity Linking in Microblog Real-Time Filtering
Microblogging is a model of content sharing in which the temporal locality of
posts with respect to important events, either of foreseeable or unforeseeable
nature, makes applica- tions of real-time filtering of great practical
interest. We propose the use of Entity Linking (EL) in order to improve the
retrieval effectiveness, by enriching the representation of microblog posts and
filtering queries. EL is the process of recognizing in an unstructured text the
mention of relevant entities described in a knowledge base. EL of short pieces
of text is a difficult task, but it is also a scenario in which the information
EL adds to the text can have a substantial impact on the retrieval process. We
implement a start-of-the-art filtering method, based on the best systems from
the TREC Microblog track realtime adhoc retrieval and filtering tasks , and
extend it with a Wikipedia-based EL method. Results show that the use of EL
significantly improves over non-EL based versions of the filtering methods.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. SAC 2015, Salamanca, Spain - April 13 -
17, 201
Towards evaluation of personalized and collaborative information retrieval
We propose to extend standard information retrieval (IR) ad-hoc test collection design to facilitate research on personalized and collaborative IR by gathering additional meta-information during the topic (query) development process. We propose a controlled query generation process with activity logging for each topic developer. The standard ad-hoc collection will thus be accompanied by a new set of thematically related topics and the associated log information, and has the potential to simulate a real-world search scenario to encourage retrieval systems to mine user information from the logs to improve IR effectiveness. The proposed methodology described in this paper will be applied in a pilot task which is scheduled to run in the FIRE 2011 evaluation campaign. The task aims at investigating the research question of whether personalized and collaborative IR retrieval experiments and evaluation can be pursued by enriching a standard ad-hoc collection with such meta-information
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