25,975 research outputs found
Relevance-based Word Embedding
Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also
known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural
language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are
typically learned based on term proximity in a large corpus. This means that
the objective in well-known word embedding algorithms, e.g., word2vec, is to
accurately predict adjacent word(s) for a given word or context. However, this
objective is not necessarily equivalent to the goal of many information
retrieval (IR) tasks. The primary objective in various IR tasks is to capture
relevance instead of term proximity, syntactic, or even semantic similarity.
This is the motivation for developing unsupervised relevance-based word
embedding models that learn word representations based on query-document
relevance information. In this paper, we propose two learning models with
different objective functions; one learns a relevance distribution over the
vocabulary set for each query, and the other classifies each term as belonging
to the relevant or non-relevant class for each query. To train our models, we
used over six million unique queries and the top ranked documents retrieved in
response to each query, which are assumed to be relevant to the query. We
extrinsically evaluate our learned word representation models using two IR
tasks: query expansion and query classification. Both query expansion
experiments on four TREC collections and query classification experiments on
the KDD Cup 2005 dataset suggest that the relevance-based word embedding models
significantly outperform state-of-the-art proximity-based embedding models,
such as word2vec and GloVe.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '17
A survey of statistical approaches for query expansion
A major issue in effective information retrieval is the problem of vocabulary mismatches. The method called query expansion addresses this issue by reformulating each search query with additional terms that better define the information needs of the user. Many researchers have contributed to improving the accuracy of information retrieval systems, through different approaches to query expansion. In this article, we primarily discuss statistical query expansion approaches that include document analysis, search and browse log analyses, and web knowledge analyses. In addition to proposing a comprehensive classification for these
approaches, we also briefly analyse the pros and cons of each technique. Finally, we evaluate these techniques using five functional features and experimental settings such as TREC collection and results of performance metrics. An in-depth survey of different statistical query expansion approaches suggests that the selection of the best approach depends on the type of search query, the nature and availability of data resources, and performance efficiency requirements
Improved data retrieval from TreeBASE via taxonomic and linguistic data enrichment
Background: TreeBASE, the only data repository for phylogenetic studies, is not being used effectively since it does not meet the taxonomic data retrieval requirements of the systematics community. We show, through an examination of the queries performed on TreeBASE, that data retrieval using taxon names is unsatisfactory. Results: We report on a new wrapper supporting taxon queries on TreeBASE by utilising a Taxonomy and Classification Database (TCl-Db) we created. TCl-Db holds merged and consolidated taxonomic names from multiple data sources and can be used to translate hierarchical, vernacular and synonym queries into specific query terms in TreeBASE. The query expansion supported by TCl-Db shows very significant information retrieval quality improvement. The wrapper can be accessed at the URL http://spira.zoology.gla.ac.uk/app/tbasewrapper.php The methodology we developed is scalable and can be applied to new data, as those become available in the future. Conclusion: Significantly improved data retrieval quality is shown for all queries, and additional flexibility is achieved via user-driven taxonomy selection
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Neural Models for Information Retrieval without Labeled Data
Recent developments of machine learning models, and in particular deep neural networks, have yielded significant improvements on several computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition tasks. Progress with information retrieval (IR) tasks has been slower, however, due to the lack of large-scale training data as well as neural network models specifically designed for effective information retrieval. In this dissertation, we address these two issues by introducing task-specific neural network architectures for a set of IR tasks and proposing novel unsupervised or \emph{weakly supervised} solutions for training the models. The proposed learning solutions do not require labeled training data. Instead, in our weak supervision approach, neural models are trained on a large set of noisy and biased training data obtained from external resources, existing models, or heuristics.
We first introduce relevance-based embedding models that learn distributed representations for words and queries. We show that the learned representations can be effectively employed for a set of IR tasks, including query expansion, pseudo-relevance feedback, and query classification.
We further propose a standalone learning to rank model based on deep neural networks. Our model learns a sparse representation for queries and documents. This enables us to perform efficient retrieval by constructing an inverted index in the learned semantic space. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art retrieval models, while performing as efficiently as term matching retrieval models.
We additionally propose a neural network framework for predicting the performance of a retrieval model for a given query. Inspired by existing query performance prediction models, our framework integrates several information sources, such as retrieval score distribution and term distribution in the top retrieved documents. This leads to state-of-the-art results for the performance prediction task on various standard collections.
We finally bridge the gap between retrieval and recommendation models, as the two key components in most information systems. Search and recommendation often share the same goal: helping people get the information they need at the right time. Therefore, joint modeling and optimization of search engines and recommender systems could potentially benefit both systems. In more detail, we introduce a retrieval model that is trained using user-item interaction (e.g., recommendation data), with no need to query-document relevance information for training.
Our solutions and findings in this dissertation smooth the path towards learning efficient and effective models for various information retrieval and related tasks, especially when large-scale training data is not available
Re-examining the potential effectiveness of interactive query expansion
Much attention has been paid to the relative effectiveness of interactive query expansion versus automatic query expansion. Although interactive query expansion has the potential to be an effective means of improving a search, in this paper we show that, on average, human searchers are less likely than systems to make good expansion decisions. To enable good expansion decisions, searchers must have adequate instructions on how to use interactive query expansion functionalities. We show that simple instructions on using interactive query expansion do not necessarily help searchers make good expansion decisions and discuss difficulties found in making query expansion decisions
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
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