Subject indexing and citation indexing—part I: Clustering structure in the cystic fibrosis document collection*

The presence of clustering structure in the cystic fibrosis Document Collection is evaluated as a function of the exhaustivity of four subject representations and two citation representations. Experimental results show that for each representation the evidence for clustering structure diminishes as the exhaustivity of the representation decreases. Three of the four subject representations show no evidence of clustering structure at the least exhaustive representations. Although many documents have no references or citations, the citation representations demonstrate the presence of clustering structure over a wider range of exhaustivity levels than the subject representations. Both citation indexes show evidence of clustering structure at the least exhaustive representations. The structures imposed on the CF Document Collection by the subject and citation indexes satisfy the necessary condition for a meaningful clustering outcome.     

Testing the cluster hypothesis in distributed information retrieval

How to merge and organise query results retrieved from different resources is one of the key issues in distributed information retrieval. Some previous research and experiments suggest that cluster-based document browsing is more effective than a single merged list. Cluster-based retrieval results presentation is based on the cluster hypothesis, which states that documents that cluster together have a similar relevance to a given query. However, while this hypothesis has been demonstrated to hold in classical information retrieval environments, it has never been fully tested in heterogeneous distributed information retrieval environments. Heterogeneous document representations, the presence of document duplicates, and disparate qualities of retrieval results, are major features of an heterogeneous distributed information retrieval environment that might disrupt the effectiveness of the cluster hypothesis. In this paper we report on an experimental investigation into the validity and effectiveness of the cluster hypothesis in highly heterogeneous distributed information retrieval environments. The results show that although clustering is affected by different retrieval results representations and quality, the cluster hypothesis still holds and that generating hierarchical clusters in highly heterogeneous distributed information retrieval environments is still a very effective way of presenting retrieval results to users.     

An evaluation of Goffman's indirect retrieval method

The indirect retrieval method proposed by Goffman is outlined and some similarities to other retrieval methods are indicated. The method is then evaluated and the results are compared with those obtained on the same document collection with cluster-based retrieval using single-link clustering.The comparisons show that although the effectiveness of the indirect retrieval method can be comparable to cluster-based retrieval, the efficiency is lower.     

Adaptive document clustering based on query-based similarity

In information retrieval, cluster-based retrieval is a well-known attempt in resolving the problem of term mismatch. Clustering requires similarity information between the documents, which is difficult to calculate at a feasible time. The adaptive document clustering scheme has been investigated by researchers to resolve this problem. However, its theoretical viewpoint has not been fully discovered. In this regard, we provide a conceptual viewpoint of the adaptive document clustering based on query-based similarities, by regarding the user’s query as a concept. As a result, adaptive document clustering scheme can be viewed as an approximation of this similarity. Based on this idea, we derive three new query-based similarity measures in language modeling framework, and evaluate them in the context of cluster-based retrieval, comparing with K-means clustering and full document expansion. Evaluation result shows that retrievals based on query-based similarities significantly improve the baseline, while being comparable to other methods. This implies that the newly developed query-based similarities become feasible criterions for adaptive document clustering.     

A relevance feedback mechanism for cluster-based retrieval

Contextual document clustering is a novel approach which uses information theoretic measures to cluster semantically related documents bound together by an implicit set of concepts or themes of narrow specificity. It facilitates cluster-based retrieval by assessing the similarity between a query and the cluster themes’ probability distribution. In this paper, we assess a relevance feedback mechanism, based on query refinement, that modifies the query’s probability distribution using a small number of documents that have been judged relevant to the query. We demonstrate that by providing only one relevance judgment, a performance improvement of 33% was obtained.     

面向非相关文献的知识关联检索系统的设计与实现

[目的/意义]面向非相关文献的知识关联能够促进新知识的产生，为科学研究提供了一种有效的辅助手段。[方法/过程]本文以《中国分类主题词表》为主题词受控词表，首先对文献摘要进行中文分词处理并提取主题词，利用计量分析技术和聚类技术分析文献间特征的相似、相异水平，然后基于该系统为用户检索并利用用TOP-K算法反馈用户精确结果。[结果/结论]设计了面向非相关文献的知识关联检索系统，从更细的粒度层面揭示文献之间的知识关联，为用户提供高质量的服务。     

An empirical study of query expansion and cluster-based retrieval in language modeling approach

The term mismatch problem in information retrieval is a critical problem, and several techniques have been developed, such as query expansion, cluster-based retrieval and dimensionality reduction to resolve this issue. Of these techniques, this paper performs an empirical study on query expansion and cluster-based retrieval. We examine the effect of using parsimony in query expansion and the effect of clustering algorithms in cluster-based retrieval. In addition, query expansion and cluster-based retrieval are compared, and their combinations are evaluated in terms of retrieval performance by performing experimentations on seven test collections of NTCIR and TREC.     

Deciphering cluster representations

There are several recent studies that propose search output clustering as an alternative representation method to ranked output. Users are provided with cluster representations instead of lists of titles and invited to make decisions on groups of documents. This paper discusses the difficulties involved in representing clusters for users’ evaluation in a concise but easily interpretable form. The discussion is based on findings and user feedback from a user study investigating the effectiveness of search output clustering. The overall impression created by the experiment results and users’ feedback is that clusters cannot be relied on to consistently produce meaningful document groups that can easily be recognised by the users. They also seem to lead to unrealistic user expectations.     

Predicting document retrieval system performance: an expected precision measure

Document retrieval systems based on probabilistic or fuzzy logic considerations may order documents for retrieval. Users then examine the ordered documents until deciding to stop, based on the estimate that the highest ranked unretrieved document will be most economically not retrieved. We propose an expected precision measure useful in estimating the performance expected if yet unretrieved documents were to be retrieved, providing information that may result in more economical stopping decisions. An expected precision graph, comparing expected precision versus document rank, may graphically display the relative expected precision of retrieved and unretrieved documents and may be used as a stopping aid for online searching of text data bases. The effectiveness of relevance feedback may be examined as a search progresses. Expected precision values may also be used as a cutoff for systems consistent with probabilistic models operating in batch modes. Techniques are given for computing the best expected precision obtainable and the expected precision of subject neutral documents.     

Text retrieval with more realistic concept matching and reinforcement learning

This paper reports our experimental investigation into the use of more realistic concepts as opposed to simple keywords for document retrieval, and reinforcement learning for improving document representations to help the retrieval of useful documents for relevant queries. The framework used for achieving this was based on the theory of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Lattice Theory. Features or concepts of each document (and query), formulated according to FCA, are represented in a separate concept lattice and are weighted separately with respect to the individual documents they present. The document retrieval process is viewed as a continuous conversation between queries and documents, during which documents are allowed to learn a set of significant concepts to help their retrieval. The learning strategy used was based on relevance feedback information that makes the similarity of relevant documents stronger and non-relevant documents weaker. Test results obtained on the Cranfield collection show a significant increase in average precisions as the system learns from experience.     

Cluster-based patent retrieval

Through the recent NTCIR workshops, patent retrieval casts many challenging issues to information retrieval community. Unlike newspaper articles, patent documents are very long and well structured. These characteristics raise the necessity to reassess existing retrieval techniques that have been mainly developed for structure-less and short documents such as newspapers. This study investigates cluster-based retrieval in the context of invalidity search task of patent retrieval. Cluster-based retrieval assumes that clusters would provide additional evidence to match user’s information need. Thus far, cluster-based retrieval approaches have relied on automatically-created clusters. Fortunately, all patents have manually-assigned cluster information, international patent classification codes. International patent classification is a standard taxonomy for classifying patents, and has currently about 69,000 nodes which are organized into a five-level hierarchical system. Thus, patent documents could provide the best test bed to develop and evaluate cluster-based retrieval techniques. Experiments using the NTCIR-4 patent collection showed that the cluster-based language model could be helpful to improving the cluster-less baseline language model.     

Re-ranking method based on inter-document distances

Lately there has been intensive research into the possibilities of using additional information about documents (such as hyperlinks) to improve retrieval effectiveness. It is called data fusion, based on the intuitive principle that different document and query representations or different methods lead to a better estimation of the documents' relevance scores.In this paper we propose a new method of document re-ranking that enables us to improve document scores using inter-document relationships. These relationships are expressed by distances and can be obtained from the text, hyperlinks or other information. The method formalizes the intuition that strongly related documents should not be assigned very different weights.     

Exploration of textual document archives using a fuzzy hierarchical clustering algorithm in the GAMBAL system

The Internet, together with the large amount of textual information available in document archives, has increased the relevance of information retrieval related tools. In this work we present an extension of the Gambal system for clustering and visualization of documents based on fuzzy clustering techniques. The tool allows to structure the set of documents in a hierarchical way (using a fuzzy hierarchical structure) and represent this structure in a graphical interface (a 3D sphere) over which the user can navigate.Gambal allows the analysis of the documents and the computation of their similarity not only on the basis of the syntactic similarity between words but also based on a dictionary (Wordnet 1.7) and latent semantics analysis.     

Summarisation of the logical structure of XML documents

Summarisation is traditionally used to produce summaries of the textual contents of documents. In this paper, it is argued that summarisation methods can also be applied to the logical structure of XML documents. Structure summarisation selects the most important elements of the logical structure and ensures that the user’s attention is focused towards sections, subsections, etc. that are believed to be of particular interest. Structure summaries are shown to users as hierarchical tables of contents. This paper discusses methods for structure summarisation that use various features of XML elements in order to select document portions that a user’s attention should be focused to. An evaluation methodology for structure summarisation is also introduced and summarisation results using various summariser versions are presented and compared to one another. We show that data sets used in information retrieval evaluation can be used effectively in order to produce high quality (query independent) structure summaries. We also discuss the choice and effectiveness of particular summariser features with respect to several evaluation measures.     

文本聚类算法的质量评价

文本聚类是建立大规模文本集合的分类体系实例的有效手段之一。本文讨论了利用标准的分类测试集合进行聚类质量的量化评价的手段，选择了k-Means聚类算法、STC（后缀树聚类）算法和基于Ant的聚类算法进行了实验对比。对实验结果的分析表明，STC聚类算法由于在处理文本时充分考虑了文本的短语特性，其聚类效果较好；基于Ant的聚类算法的结果受参数输入的影响较大；在Ant聚类算法中引入文本特性可以提高聚类结果的质量。     

Best entry points for structured document retrieval—Part II: Types,usage and effectiveness

Structured document retrieval makes use of document components as the basis of the retrieval process, rather than complete documents. The inherent relationships between these components make it vital to support users’ natural browsing behaviour in order to offer effective and efficient access to structured documents. This paper examines the concept of best entry points, which are document components from which the user can browse to obtain optimal access to relevant document components. It investigates at the types of best entry points in structured document retrieval, and their usage and effectiveness in real information search tasks.     

Learning entity-centric document representations using an entity facet topic model

Learning semantic representations of documents is essential for various downstream applications, including text classification and information retrieval. Entities, as important sources of information, have been playing a crucial role in assisting latent representations of documents. In this work, we hypothesize that entities are not monolithic concepts; instead they have multiple aspects, and different documents may be discussing different aspects of a given entity. Given that, we argue that from an entity-centric point of view, a document related to multiple entities shall be (a) represented differently for different entities (multiple entity-centric representations), and (b) each entity-centric representation should reflect the specific aspects of the entity discussed in the document.In this work, we devise the following research questions: (1) Can we confirm that entities have multiple aspects, with different aspects reflected in different documents, (2) can we learn a representation of entity aspects from a collection of documents, and a representation of document based on the multiple entities and their aspects as reflected in the documents, (3) does this novel representation improves algorithm performance in downstream applications, and (4) what is a reasonable number of aspects per entity? To answer these questions we model each entity using multiple aspects (entity facets¹), where each entity facet is represented as a mixture of latent topics. Then, given a document associated with multiple entities, we assume multiple entity-centric representations, where each entity-centric representation is a mixture of entity facets for each entity. Finally, a novel graphical model, the Entity Facet Topic Model (EFTM), is proposed in order to learn entity-centric document representations, entity facets, and latent topics.Through experimentation we confirm that (1) entities are multi-faceted concepts which we can model and learn, (2) a multi-faceted entity-centric modeling of documents can lead to effective representations, which (3) can have an impact in downstream application, and (4) considering a small number of facets is effective enough. In particular, we visualize entity facets within a set of documents, and demonstrate that indeed different sets of documents reflect different facets of entities. Further, we demonstrate that the proposed entity facet topic model generates better document representations in terms of perplexity, compared to state-of-the-art document representation methods. Moreover, we show that the proposed model outperforms baseline methods in the application of multi-label classification. Finally, we study the impact of EFTM’s parameters and find that a small number of facets better captures entity specific topics, which confirms the intuition that on average an entity has a small number of facets reflected in documents.     

Clustering tagged documents with labeled and unlabeled documents

This study employs our proposed semi-supervised clustering method called Constrained-PLSA to cluster tagged documents with a small amount of labeled documents and uses two data sets for system performance evaluations. The first data set is a document set whose boundaries among the clusters are not clear; while the second one has clear boundaries among clusters. This study employs abstracts of papers and the tags annotated by users to cluster documents. Four combinations of tags and words are used for feature representations. The experimental results indicate that almost all of the methods can benefit from tags. However, unsupervised learning methods fail to function properly in the data set with noisy information, but Constrained-PLSA functions properly. In many real applications, background knowledge is ready, making it appropriate to employ background knowledge in the clustering process to make the learning more fast and effective.     

The effectiveness of query-specific hierarchic clustering in information retrieval

Hierarchic document clustering has been widely applied to information retrieval (IR) on the grounds of its potential improved effectiveness over inverted file search (IFS). However, previous research has been inconclusive as to whether clustering does bring improvements. In this paper we take the view that if hierarchic clustering is applied to search results (query-specific clustering), then it has the potential to increase the retrieval effectiveness compared both to that of static clustering and of conventional IFS. We conducted a number of experiments using five document collections and four hierarchic clustering methods. Our results show that the effectiveness of query-specific clustering is indeed higher, and suggest that there is scope for its application to IR.     

WebStar: a visualization model for hyperlink structures

The authors introduce an information visualization model, WebStar, for hyperlink-based information systems. Hyperlinks within a hyperlink-based document can be visualized in a two-dimensional visual space. All links are projected within a display sphere in the visual space. The relationship between a specified central document and its hyperlinked documents is visually presented in the visual space. In addition, users are able to define a group of subjects and to observe relevance between each subject and all hyperlinked documents via movement of that subject around the display sphere center. WebStar allows users to dynamically change an interest center during navigation. A retrieval mechanism is developed to control retrieved results in the visual space. Impact of movement of a subject on the visual document distribution is analyzed. An ambiguity problem caused by projection is discussed. Potential applications of this visualization model in information retrieval are included. Future research directions on the topic are addressed.