Statistical comparisons of non-deterministic IR systems using two dimensional variance

Retrieval systems with non-deterministic output are widely used in information retrieval. Common examples include sampling, approximation algorithms, or interactive user input. The effectiveness of such systems differs not just for different topics, but also for different instances of the system. The inherent variance presents a dilemma - What is the best way to measure the effectiveness of a non-deterministic IR system? Existing approaches to IR evaluation do not consider this problem, or the potential impact on statistical significance. In this paper, we explore how such variance can affect system comparisons, and propose an evaluation framework and methodologies capable of doing this comparison. Using the context of distributed information retrieval as a case study for our investigation, we show that the approaches provide a consistent and reliable methodology to compare the effectiveness of a non-deterministic system with a deterministic or another non-deterministic system. In addition, we present a statistical best-practice that can be used to safely show how a non-deterministic IR system has equivalent effectiveness to another IR system, and how to avoid the common pitfall of misusing a lack of significance as a proof that two systems have equivalent effectiveness

Vertical intent prediction approach based on Doc2vec and convolutional neural networks for improving vertical selection in aggregated search

Vertical selection is the task of selecting the most relevant verticals to a given query in order to improve the diversity and quality of web search results. This task requires not only predicting relevant verticals but also these verticals must be those the user expects to be relevant for his particular information need. Most existing works focused on using traditional machine learning techniques to combine multiple types of features for selecting several relevant verticals. Although these techniques are very efficient, handling vertical selection with high accuracy is still a challenging research task. In this paper, we propose an approach for improving vertical selection in order to satisfy the user vertical intent and reduce user’s browsing time and efforts. First, it generates query embeddings vectors using the doc2vec algorithm that preserves syntactic and semantic information within each query. Secondly, this vector will be used as input to a convolutional neural network model for increasing the representation of the query with multiple levels of abstraction including rich semantic information and then creating a global summarization of the query features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experimentation using various datasets. Our experimental findings show that our system achieves significant accuracy. Further, it realizes accurate predictions on new unseen data

SparkIR: a Scalable Distributed Information Retrieval Engine over Spark

Search engines have to deal with a huge amount of data (e.g., billions of documents in the case of the Web) and find scalable and efficient ways to produce effective search results. In this thesis, we propose to use Spark framework, an in memory distributed big data processing framework, and leverage its powerful capabilities of handling large amount of data to build an efficient and scalable experimental search engine over textual documents. The proposed system, SparkIR, can serve as a research framework for conducting information retrieval (IR) experiments. SparkIR supports two indexing schemes, document-based partitioning and term-based partitioning, to adopt document-at-a-time (DAAT) and term-at-a-time (TAAT) query evaluation methods. Moreover, it offers static and dynamic pruning to improve the retrieval efficiency. For static pruning, it employs champion list and tiering, while for dynamic pruning, it uses MaxScore top k retrieval. We evaluated the performance of SparkIR using ClueWeb12-B13 collection that contains about 50M English Web pages. Experiments over different subsets of the collection and compared the Elasticsearch baseline show that SparkIR exhibits reasonable efficiency and scalability performance overall for both indexing and retrieval. Implemented as an open-source library over Spark, users of SparkIR can also benefit from other Spark libraries (e.g., MLlib and GraphX), which, therefore, eliminates the need of usin

Benchmarking Scalability of NoSQL Databases for Geospatial Queries

NoSQL databases provide an edge when it comes to dealing with big unstructured data. Flexibility, agility, and scalability offered by NoSQL databases become increasingly essential when dealing with geospatial data. The proliferation of geospatial applications has tremendously increased the variety, velocity, and volume of data that the data stores must manage. Such characteristics of big spatial data surpassed the capability and anticipated use cases of relational databases. Because we can choose from an extensive collection of NoSQL databases these days, it becomes vital for organizations to make an informed decision. NoSQL Database benchmarks provide system architects, who shoulder a considerable burden of selecting the right technology for their data stores, with a vital start point and source of information. The major utility of these benchmarks is reproducing experiments on similar experimental data that can verify and optimize the process of selecting an optimum tool for data management needs in the early phases of the development. The goal of this research is to develop a benchmark that can compare the performance of NoSQL databases for querying complex geospatial data. We have analyzed throughputs, latencies, and runtime of MongoDB and Couchbase to identify the correct fit for our use case. This way we have also demonstrated a systematic process that can be followed to make an optimum choice of datastore. This benchmark can be extended easily to any NoSQL database that supports geospatial querying

Indexing methods for web archives

There have been numerous efforts recently to digitize previously published content and preserving born-digital content leading to the widespread growth of large text reposi- tories. Web archives are such continuously growing text collections which contain ver- sions of documents spanning over long time periods. Web archives present many op- portunities for historical, cultural and political analyses. Consequently there is a grow- ing need for tools which can efficiently access and search them. In this work, we are interested in indexing methods for supporting text-search work- loads over web archives like time-travel queries and phrase queries. To this end we make the following contributions: • Time-travel queries are keyword queries with a temporal predicate, e.g., “mpii saarland” @ [06/2009], which return versions of documents in the past. We in- troduce a novel index organization strategy, called index sharding, for efficiently supporting time-travel queries without incurring additional index-size blowup. We also propose index-maintenance approaches which scale to such continuously growing collections. • We develop query-optimization techniques for time-travel queries called partition selection which maximizes recall at any given query-execution stage. • We propose indexing methods to support phrase queries, e.g., “to be or not to be that is the question”. We index multi-word sequences and devise novel query- optimization methods over the indexed sequences to efficiently answer phrase queries. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approaches over existing methods by extensive experimentation on real-world web archives.In der jüngsten Vergangenheit gab es zahlreiche Bemühungen zuvor veröffentlichte Inhalte zu digitalisieren und elektronisch erstellte Inhalte zu erhalten. Dies führte zu einem weit verbreitenden Anstieg großer Textdatenbestände. Webarchive sind eine solche Art konstant ansteigender Textdatensammlung. Sie enthalten mehrere Versionen von Dokumenten, welche sich über längere Zeiträume erstrecken. Darüber hinaus bieten sie viele Möglichkeiten für historische, kulturelle und politische Analysen. Infolgedessen gibt es einen wachsenden Bedarf an Werkzeugen, die eine effiziente Suche in Webarchiven und einen effizienten Zugriff auf die Daten erlauben. Der Fokus dieser Arbeit liegt auf Indexierungsverfahren, um die Arbeitslast von Textsuche auf Webarchiven zu unterstützen, wie zum Beispiel time-travel queries oder phrase queries. Zu diesem Zweck leisten wir folgende Beiträge: • Time-travel queries sind Suchwortanfragen mit einem temporalen Prädikat. Zum Beispiel liefert die Anfrage “mpii saarland” @ [06/2009] Versionen des Dokuments aus der Vergangenheit als Ergebnis. Zur effizienten Unterstützung solcher Anfragen ohne die Indexgröße aufzublasen, stellen wir eine neue Strategie zur Organisation von Indizes dar, so genanntes index sharding. Des Weiteren schlagen wir Wartungsverfahren für Indizes vor, die für solch konstant wachsende Datensätze skalieren. • WirentwickelnTechnikenzurAnfrageoptimierungvontime-travelqueries, nachstehend partition selection genannt. Diese maximieren den Recall in jeder Phase der Anfrageverarbeitung. • Wir stellen Indexierungsmethoden vor, die phrase queries unterstützen, z. B. “Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage”. Wir indexieren Sequenzen bestehend aus mehreren Wörtern und entwerfen neue Optimierungsverfahren für die indexierten Sequenzen, um phrase queries effizient zu beantworten. Die Performanz dieser Verfahren wird anhand von ausführlichen Experimenten auf realen Webarchiven demonstriert

Temporal Information Models for Real-Time Microblog Search

Real-time search in Twitter and other social media services is often biased towards the most recent results due to the “in the moment” nature of topic trends and their ephemeral relevance to users and media in general. However, “in the moment”, it is often difficult to look at all emerging topics and single-out the important ones from the rest of the social media chatter. This thesis proposes to leverage on external sources to estimate the duration and burstiness of live Twitter topics. It extends preliminary research where itwas shown that temporal re-ranking using external sources could indeed improve the accuracy of results. To further explore this topic we pursued three significant novel approaches: (1) multi-source information analysis that explores behavioral dynamics of users, such as Wikipedia live edits and page view streams, to detect topic trends and estimate the topic interest over time; (2) efficient methods for federated query expansion towards the improvement of query meaning; and (3) exploiting multiple sources towards the detection of temporal query intent. It differs from past approaches in the sense that it will work over real-time queries, leveraging on live user-generated content. This approach contrasts with previous methods that require an offline preprocessing step