Strength Pareto fitness assignment for pseudo-relevance feedback: application to MEDLINE

Because of users’ growing utilization of unclear and imprecise keywords when characterizing their information need, it has become necessary to expand their original search queries with additional words that best capture their actual intent. The selection of the terms that are suitable for use as additional words is in general dependent on the degree of relatedness between each candidate expansion term and the query keywords. In this paper, we propose two criteria for evaluating the degree of relatedness between a candidate expansion word and the query keywords: (1) co-occurrence frequency, where more importance is attributed to terms occurring in the largest possible number of documents where the query keywords appear; (2) proximity, where more importance is assigned to terms having a short distance from the query terms within documents. We also employ the strength Pareto fitness assignment in order to satisfy both criteria simultaneously. The results of our numerical experiments on MEDLINE, the online medical information database, show that the proposed approach significantly enhances the retrieval performance as compared to the baseline.     

On the query refinement in the ontology-based searching for information

One of the main problems in the (web) information retrieval is the ambiguity of users’ queries, since they tend to post very short queries which do not express their information need clearly. This seems to be valid for the ontology-based information retrieval in which the domain ontology is used as the backbone of the searching process. In this paper, we present a novel approach for determining possible refinements of an ontology-based query. The approach is based on measuring the ambiguity of a query with respect to the original user's information need. We defined several types of the ambiguities concerning the structure of the underlying ontology and the content of the information repository. These ambiguities are interpreted regarding the user's information need, which we infer from the user's behaviour in searching process. Finally, the ranked list of the potentially useful refinements of her query is provided to the user. We present a small evaluation study that shows the advantages of the proposed approach.     

Visualizing Expanded Query Results

When performing queries in web search engines, users often face difficulties choosing appropriate query terms. Search engines therefore usually suggest a list of expanded versions of the user query to disambiguate it or to resolve potential term mismatches. However, it has been shown that users find it difficult to choose an expanded query from such a list. In this paper, we describe the adoption of set‐based text visualization techniques to visualize how query expansions enrich the result space of a given user query and how the result sets relate to each other. Our system uses a linguistic approach to expand queries and topic modeling to extract the most informative terms from the results of these queries. In a user study, we compare a common text list of query expansion suggestions to three set‐based text visualization techniques adopted for visualizing expanded query results – namely, Compact Euler Diagrams, Parallel Tag Clouds, and a List View – to resolve ambiguous queries using interactive query expansion. Our results show that text visualization techniques do not increase retrieval efficiency, precision, or recall. Overall, users rate Parallel Tag Clouds visualizing key terms of the expanded query space lowest. Based on the results, we derive recommendations for visualizations of query expansion results, text visualization techniques in general, and discuss alternative use cases of set‐based text visualization techniques in the context of web search.     

基于用户日志挖掘的查询扩展方法

查询扩展可以有效地消除查询歧义,提高信息检索的准确率和召回率.通过挖掘用户日志中查询词和相关文档的连接关系,构造关联查询,并在此基础上提出一种从关联查询中提取查询扩展词的查询扩展方法.同时,还提出一种查询歧义的判别方法,该方法可以对查询词所表达的检索意图的模糊程度进行有效度量,也可以对查询词的检索性能进行预先估计.通过对查询歧义的度量来动态调整扩展词的长度,提高查询扩展模型的灵活性和适应能力.     

Blind evaluation of location based queries using space transformation to preserve location privacy

In this paper we propose a fundamental approach to perform the class of Range and Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries, the core class of spatial queries used in location-based services, without revealing any location information about the query in order to preserve users’ private location information. The idea behind our approach is to utilize the power of one-way transformations to map the space of all objects and queries to another space and resolve spatial queries blindly in the transformed space. Traditional encryption based techniques, solutions based on the theory of private information retrieval, or the recently proposed anonymity and cloaking based approaches cannot provide stringent privacy guarantees without incurring costly computation and/or communication overhead. In contrast, we propose efficient algorithms to evaluate KNN and range queries privately in the Hilbert transformed space. We also propose a dual curve query resolution technique which further reduces the costs of performing range and KNN queries using a single Hilbert curve. We experimentally evaluate the performance of our proposed range and KNN query processing techniques and verify the strong level of privacy achieved with acceptable computation and communication overhead.     

基于网页查询结果的广告查询扩展研究

在计算广告学中,为用户查询返回相关的广告一直是研究的热点。然而用户的查询一般比较简短,广告的表示也局限在简短的创意和一些竞价词上,返回符合用户查询意图的广告十分困难。为了解决这个问题,该文提出利用多特征融合的方法进行广告查询扩展,先将查询输入到搜索引擎中,获得Top-k网页查询结果,将它们作为获取扩展词的外部资源,由于采用一般的特征选取方法获取扩展词采用的特征比较单一,缺乏语义信息,容易产生主题漂移现象,该文通过计算扩展词和查询词在网页查询结果中的共现度,并融合传统的TF特征和词性信息,获得与原始查询语义相关的扩展词。在真实的广告语料上的实验结果显示,基于多特征融合的选择广告扩展词的方法能有效地提高返回广告的相关性。     

HQE: A hybrid method for query expansion

Query expansion methods have been extensively studied in information retrieval. This paper proposes a query expansion method. The HQE method employs a combination of ontology-based collaborative filtering and neural networks to improve query expansion. In the HQE method, ontology-based collaborative filtering is used to analyze semantic relationships in order to find the similar users, and the radial basis function (RBF) networks are used to acquire the most relevant web documents and their corresponding terms from these similar users’ queries. The method can improve the precision and only requires users to provide less query information at the beginning than traditional collaborative filtering methods.     

基于领域本体的贝叶斯网络检索模型研究

针对传统的信息检索方法无法实现用户查询的语义理解、检索效率低等问题,本文提出基于领域本体进行查询扩展的贝叶斯网络检索模型。该模型首先将用户查询通过领域本体进行语义扩展,然后将扩展后的查询作为证据在贝叶斯网络检索模型中进行传播,进而得到查询结果,实验表明本文提出的贝叶斯网络检索模型能提高检索效率。     

Enhancing Concept-Based Retrieval Based on Minimal Term Sets

There is considerable interest in bridging the terminological gap that exists between the way users prefer to specify their information needs and the way queries are expressed in terms of keywords or text expressions that occur in documents. One of the approaches proposed for bridging this gap is based on technologies for expert systems. The central idea of such an approach was introduced in the context of a system called Rule Based Information Retrieval by Computer (RUBRIC). In RUBRIC, user query topics (or concepts) are captured in a rule base represented by an AND/OR tree. The evaluation of AND/OR tree is essentially based on minimum and maximum weights of query terms for conjunctions and disjunctions, respectively. The time to generate the retrieval output of AND/OR tree for a given query topic is exponential in number of conjunctions in the DNF expression associated with the query topic. In this paper, we propose a new approach for computing the retrieval output. The proposed approach involves preprocessing of the rule base to generate Minimal Term Sets (MTSs) that speed up the retrieval process. The computational complexity of the on-line query evaluation following the preprocessing is polynomial in m. We show that the computation and use of MTSs allows a user to choose query topics that best suit their needs and to use retrieval functions that yield a more refined and controlled retrieval output than is possible with the AND/OR tree when document terms are binary. We incorporate p-Norm model into the process of evaluating MTSs to handle the case where weights of both documents and query terms are non-binary.     

一种基于局部共现的查询扩展方法

针对信息检索中文档与查询之间的词不匹配问题,本文提出了一种基于局部共现的查询扩展方法LOCOOC。LOCOOC利用词项与所有查询词在局部文档集合中的共现程度来评估扩展词的质量,并整合了词项在语料集中的全局统计信息,使得选取的扩展词与初始查询所表征的主题或概念具有更好的相关性。实验结果表明:与未进行查询扩展时相比,采用LOCOOC方法进行扩展后,平均准确率提高40%以上;与传统的局部反馈方法以及局部上下文分析方法(LCA,Local Context Analysis)相比,LOCOOC不仅具有更优的检索性能,而且有着更好的鲁棒性。     

A personalized query expansion approach for engineering document retrieval

Engineers create engineering documents with their own terminologies, and want to search existing engineering documents quickly and accurately during a product development process. Keyword-based search methods have been widely used due to their ease of use, but their search accuracy has been often problematic because of the semantic ambiguity of terminologies in engineering documents and queries. The semantic ambiguity can be alleviated by using a domain ontology. Also, if queries are expanded to incorporate the engineer’s personalized information needs, the accuracy of the search result would be improved. Therefore, we propose a framework to search engineering documents with less semantic ambiguity and more focus on each engineer’s personalized information needs. The framework includes four processes: (1) developing a domain ontology, (2) indexing engineering documents, (3) learning user profiles, and (4) performing personalized query expansion and retrieval. A domain ontology is developed based on product structure information and engineering documents. Using the domain ontology, terminologies in documents are disambiguated and indexed. Also, a user profile is generated from the domain ontology. By user profile learning, user’s interests are captured from the relevant documents. During a personalized query expansion process, the learned user profile is used to reflect user’s interests. Simultaneously, user’s searching intent, which is implicitly inferred from the user’s task context, is also considered. To retrieve relevant documents, an expanded query in which both user’s interests and intents are reflected is then matched against the document collection. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can substantially outperform both the keyword-based approach and the existing query expansion method in retrieving engineering documents. Reflecting a user’s information needs precisely has been identified to be the most important factor underlying this notable improvement.     

The effects of multiple query evidences on social image retrieval

System performance assessment and comparison are fundamental for large-scale image search engine development. This article documents a set of comprehensive empirical studies to explore the effects of multiple query evidences on large-scale social image search. The search performance based on the social tags, different kinds of visual features and their combinations are systematically studied and analyzed. To quantify the visual query complexity, a novel quantitative metric is proposed and applied to assess the influences of different visual queries based on their complexity levels. Besides, we also study the effects of automatic text query expansion with social tags using a pseudo relevance feedback method on the retrieval performance. Our analysis of experimental results shows a few key research findings: (1) social tag-based retrieval methods can achieve much better results than content-based retrieval methods; (2) a combination of textual and visual features can significantly and consistently improve the search performance; (3) the complexity of image queries has a strong correlation with retrieval results’ quality—more complex queries lead to poorer search effectiveness; and (4) query expansion based on social tags frequently causes search topic drift and consequently leads to performance degradation.     

Automatic content based image retrieval using semantic analysis

We present a new text-to-image re-ranking approach for improving the relevancy rate in searches. In particular, we focus on the fundamental semantic gap that exists between the low-level visual features of the image and high-level textual queries by dynamically maintaining a connected hierarchy in the form of a concept database. For each textual query, we take the results from popular search engines as an initial retrieval, followed by a semantic analysis to map the textual query to higher level concepts. In order to do this, we design a two-layer scoring system which can identify the relationship between the query and the concepts automatically. We then calculate the image feature vectors and compare them with the classifier for each related concept. An image is relevant only when it is related to the query both semantically and content-wise. The second feature of this work is that we loosen the requirement for query accuracy from the user, which makes it possible to perform well on users’ queries containing less relevant information. Thirdly, the concept database can be dynamically maintained to satisfy the variations in user queries, which eliminates the need for human labor in building a sophisticated initial concept database. We designed our experiment using complex queries (based on five scenarios) to demonstrate how our retrieval results are a significant improvement over those obtained from current state-of-the-art image search engines.     

Relating ontologies with a fuzzy information model

More people than ever before have access to information with the World Wide Web; information volume and number of users both continue to expand. Traditional search methods based on keywords are not effective, resulting in large lists of documents, many of which unrelated to users’ needs. One way to improve information retrieval is to associate meaning to users’ queries by using ontologies, knowledge bases that encode a set of concepts about one domain and their relationships. Encoding a knowledge base using one single ontology is usual, but a document collection can deal with different domains, each organized into an ontology. This work presents a novel way to represent and organize knowledge, from distinct domains, using multiple ontologies that can be related. The model allows the ontologies, as well as the relationships between concepts from distinct ontologies, to be represented independently. Additionally, fuzzy set theory techniques are employed to deal with knowledge subjectivity and uncertainty. This approach to organize knowledge and an associated query expansion method are integrated into a fuzzy model for information retrieval based on multi-related ontologies. The performance of a search engine using this model is compared with another fuzzy-based approach for information retrieval, and with the Apache Lucene search engine. Experimental results show that this model improves precision and recall measures.     

基于用户意图识别的查询推荐研究

信息检索的效果很大程度上取决于用户能否输入恰当的查询来描述自身信息需求。很多查询通常简短而模糊,甚至包含噪音。查询推荐技术可以帮助用户提炼查询、准确描述信息需求。为了获得高质量的查询推荐,在大规模“查询-链接”二部图上采用随机漫步方法产生候选集合。利用摘要点击信息对候选列表进行重排序,使得体现用户意图的查询排在比较高的位置。最终采用基于学习的算法对推荐查询中可能存在的噪声进行过滤。基于真实用户行为数据的实验表明该方法取得了较好的效果。     

Natural language technology and query expansion: issues, state-of-the-art and perspectives

The availability of an abundance of knowledge sources has spurred a large amount of effort in the development and enhancement of Information Retrieval techniques. Users’ information needs are expressed in natural language and successful retrieval is very much dependent on the effective communication of the intended purpose. Natural language queries consist of multiple linguistic features which serve to represent the intended search goal. Linguistic characteristics that cause semantic ambiguity and misinterpretation of queries as well as additional factors such as the lack of familiarity with the search environment affect the users’ ability to accurately represent their information needs, coined by the concept “intention gap”. The latter directly affects the relevance of the returned search results which may not be to the users’ satisfaction and therefore is a major issue impacting the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Central to our discussion is the identification of the significant constituents that characterize the query intent and their enrichment through the addition of meaningful terms, phrases or even latent representations, either manually or automatically to capture their intended meaning. Specifically, we discuss techniques to achieve the enrichment and in particular those utilizing the information gathered from statistical processing of term dependencies within a document corpus or from external knowledge sources such as ontologies. We lay down the anatomy of a generic linguistic based query expansion framework and propose its module-based decomposition, covering topical issues from query processing, information retrieval, computational linguistics and ontology engineering. For each of the modules we review state-of-the-art solutions in the literature categorized and analyzed under the light of the techniques used.     

基于SRCSAC评价框架挖掘的跨语言查询译后扩展

提出一种面向查询扩展的基于评价框架SRCSAC(support-relevancy-chi-square analysis-confidence)的加权关联规则挖掘算法,给出跨语言查询译后扩展模型和新的扩展词权值计算方法,并提出基于SRCSAC框架挖掘的跨语言查询译后扩展算法.该算法采用支持度-关联度框架和新的剪枝策略挖掘有效频繁项集,通过卡方分析-置信度框架从有效频繁项集中提取加权关联规则,根据扩展模型从关联规则中获取优质扩展词,实现跨语言译后扩展.实验结果表明:所提算法能有效遏制查询主题漂移和词不匹配问题;与基准检索比较,其前件扩展、后件扩展和混合扩展的MAP最低平均增幅分别为86.85%、86.04%和86.00%;与对比方法比较,其长查询检索的MAP最低平均增幅分别可达12.23%、9.06%和12.6%,都高于短查询检索的增幅;与后件扩展算法比较,前件扩展和混合扩展的MAP最高增幅可达5.5%;置信度有助于提升前件扩展和混合扩展算法的检索性能,关联度有利于后件扩展算法检索性能的提高,支持度和关联度对后件扩展算法的短查询检索更有效.