2,652 research outputs found
Extracting Hierarchies of Search Tasks & Subtasks via a Bayesian Nonparametric Approach
A significant amount of search queries originate from some real world
information need or tasks. In order to improve the search experience of the end
users, it is important to have accurate representations of tasks. As a result,
significant amount of research has been devoted to extracting proper
representations of tasks in order to enable search systems to help users
complete their tasks, as well as providing the end user with better query
suggestions, for better recommendations, for satisfaction prediction, and for
improved personalization in terms of tasks. Most existing task extraction
methodologies focus on representing tasks as flat structures. However, tasks
often tend to have multiple subtasks associated with them and a more
naturalistic representation of tasks would be in terms of a hierarchy, where
each task can be composed of multiple (sub)tasks. To this end, we propose an
efficient Bayesian nonparametric model for extracting hierarchies of such tasks
\& subtasks. We evaluate our method based on real world query log data both
through quantitative and crowdsourced experiments and highlight the importance
of considering task/subtask hierarchies.Comment: 10 pages. Accepted at SIGIR 2017 as a full pape
A Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder For Generative Context-Aware Query Suggestion
Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information
need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To
preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and
account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context
awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a probabilistic
suggestion model that is able to account for sequences of previous queries of
arbitrary lengths. Our novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder
architecture allows the model to be sensitive to the order of queries in the
context while avoiding data sparsity. Additionally, our model can suggest for
rare, or long-tail, queries. The produced suggestions are synthetic and are
sampled one word at a time, using computationally cheap decoding techniques.
This is in contrast to current synthetic suggestion models relying upon machine
learning pipelines and hand-engineered feature sets. Results show that it
outperforms existing context-aware approaches in a next query prediction
setting. In addition to query suggestion, our model is general enough to be
used in a variety of other applications.Comment: To appear in Conference of Information Knowledge and Management
(CIKM) 201
Measuring the Sentence Level Similarity
This article describes a method used to calculate the similarity between short English texts, specifically of sentence length. The described algorithm calculates semantic and word order similarities of two sentences. In order to do so, it uses a structured lexical knowledge base and statistical information from a corpus. The described method works well in determining sentence similarity for most sentence pairs, consequently the implemented method can be used in computer automated sentence similarity measurements and other text based mining problems. We encapsulated the implemented algorithm in a .NET library, to simplify the task of calculating sentence similarity for end users
From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics
Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This
profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of
computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to
analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning
to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic
processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the
structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of
VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding
three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these
three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project
in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of
applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for
those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the
literature for those who are less familiar with the field
Query Expansion for Survey Question Retrieval in the Social Sciences
In recent years, the importance of research data and the need to archive and
to share it in the scientific community have increased enormously. This
introduces a whole new set of challenges for digital libraries. In the social
sciences typical research data sets consist of surveys and questionnaires. In
this paper we focus on the use case of social science survey question reuse and
on mechanisms to support users in the query formulation for data sets. We
describe and evaluate thesaurus- and co-occurrence-based approaches for query
expansion to improve retrieval quality in digital libraries and research data
archives. The challenge here is to translate the information need and the
underlying sociological phenomena into proper queries. As we can show retrieval
quality can be improved by adding related terms to the queries. In a direct
comparison automatically expanded queries using extracted co-occurring terms
can provide better results than queries manually reformulated by a domain
expert and better results than a keyword-based BM25 baseline.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of 19th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Digital Libraries 2015 (TPDL 2015
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