25,445 research outputs found
Thesaurus-assisted search term selection and query expansion: a review of user-centred studies
This paper provides a review of the literature related to the application of domain-specific thesauri in the search and retrieval process. Focusing on studies which adopt a user-centred approach, the review presents a survey of the methodologies and results from empirical studies undertaken on the use of thesauri as sources of term selection for query formulation and expansion during the search process. It summaries the ways in which domain-specific thesauri from different disciplines have been used by various types of users and how these tools aid users in the selection of search terms. The review consists of two main sections covering, firstly studies on thesaurus-aided search term selection and secondly those dealing with query expansion using thesauri. Both sections are illustrated with case studies that have adopted a user-centred approach
User - Thesaurus Interaction in a Web-Based Database: An Evaluation of Users' Term Selection Behaviour
A major challenge faced by users during the information search and retrieval process is the selection of search terms for query formulation and expansion. Thesauri are recognised as one source of search terms which can assist users in query construction and expansion. As the number of electronic thesauri attached to information retrieval systems has grown, a range of interface facilities and features have been developed to aid users in formulating their queries. The pilot study reported here aimed to explore and evaluate how a thesaurus-enhanced search interface assisted end-users in selecting search terms. Specifically, it focused on the evaluation of users' attitudes toward both the thesaurus and its interface as tools for facilitating search term selection for query expansion. Thesaurusbased searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with a thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined
Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)
This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies
Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for
Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user
support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources
including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate
and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from
retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct
user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of
concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion.
The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in
the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first
phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept
derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with
user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the
design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase
entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system.
The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from
sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach
provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in
turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept
hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The
extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With
respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for
viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are
outlined
Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies
Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR
Aggregated Deep Local Features for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval
Remote Sensing Image Retrieval remains a challenging topic due to the special
nature of Remote Sensing Imagery. Such images contain various different
semantic objects, which clearly complicates the retrieval task. In this paper,
we present an image retrieval pipeline that uses attentive, local convolutional
features and aggregates them using the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors
(VLAD) to produce a global descriptor. We study various system parameters such
as the multiplicative and additive attention mechanisms and descriptor
dimensionality. We propose a query expansion method that requires no external
inputs. Experiments demonstrate that even without training, the local
convolutional features and global representation outperform other systems.
After system tuning, we can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results.
Furthermore, we observe that our query expansion method increases overall
system performance by about 3%, using only the top-three retrieved images.
Finally, we show how dimensionality reduction produces compact descriptors with
increased retrieval performance and fast retrieval computation times, e.g. 50%
faster than the current systems.Comment: Published in Remote Sensing. The first two authors have equal
contributio
Improving average ranking precision in user searches for biomedical research datasets
Availability of research datasets is keystone for health and life science
study reproducibility and scientific progress. Due to the heterogeneity and
complexity of these data, a main challenge to be overcome by research data
management systems is to provide users with the best answers for their search
queries. In the context of the 2016 bioCADDIE Dataset Retrieval Challenge, we
investigate a novel ranking pipeline to improve the search of datasets used in
biomedical experiments. Our system comprises a query expansion model based on
word embeddings, a similarity measure algorithm that takes into consideration
the relevance of the query terms, and a dataset categorisation method that
boosts the rank of datasets matching query constraints. The system was
evaluated using a corpus with 800k datasets and 21 annotated user queries. Our
system provides competitive results when compared to the other challenge
participants. In the official run, it achieved the highest infAP among the
participants, being +22.3% higher than the median infAP of the participant's
best submissions. Overall, it is ranked at top 2 if an aggregated metric using
the best official measures per participant is considered. The query expansion
method showed positive impact on the system's performance increasing our
baseline up to +5.0% and +3.4% for the infAP and infNDCG metrics, respectively.
Our similarity measure algorithm seems to be robust, in particular compared to
Divergence From Randomness framework, having smaller performance variations
under different training conditions. Finally, the result categorization did not
have significant impact on the system's performance. We believe that our
solution could be used to enhance biomedical dataset management systems. In
particular, the use of data driven query expansion methods could be an
alternative to the complexity of biomedical terminologies
A study of query expansion methods for patent retrieval
Patent retrieval is a recall-oriented search task where the objective is to find all possible relevant documents. Queries in patent retrieval are typically very long since they take the form of a patent claim or even a full patent application in the case of priorart patent search. Nevertheless, there is generally a significant mismatch between the query and the relevant documents, often leading to low retrieval effectiveness. Some previous work has
tried to address this mismatch through the application of query expansion (QE) techniques which have generally showed
effectiveness for many other retrieval tasks. However, results of QE on patent search have been found to be very disappointing. We present a review of previous investigations of QE in patent retrieval, and explore some of these techniques on a prior-art patent search task. In addition, a novel method for QE using automatically generated synonyms set is presented. While previous QE techniques fail to improve over baseline retrieval, our new approach show statistically better retrieval precision over
the baseline, although not for recall. In addition, it proves to be significantly more efficient than existing techniques. An extensive analysis to the results is presented which seeks to better understand situations where these QE techniques succeed or fail
- …