Learning to merge search results for efficient Distributed Information Retrieval

Merging search results from different servers is a major problem in Distributed Information Retrieval. We used Regression-SVM and Ranking-SVM which would learn a function that merges results based on information that is readily available: i.e. the ranks, titles, summaries and URLs contained in the results pages. By not downloading additional information, such as the full document, we decrease bandwidth usage. CORI and Round Robin merging were used as our baselines; surprisingly, our results show that the SVM-methods do not improve over those baselines

Research Proposal for Distributed Deep Web Search

This proposal identifies two main problems related to deep web search, and proposes a step by step solution for each of them. The first problem is about searching deep web content by means of a simple free-text interface (with just one input field, instead of a complex interface with many input fields). To this end, we propose a real-time query conversion layer to translate a free-text query into a structured query. The second problem concerns the scalability of the system, and we propose to use a distributed approach