Structured queries,language modeling,and relevance modeling in cross-language information retrieval

Two probabilistic approaches to cross-lingual retrieval are in wide use today, those based on probabilistic models of relevance, as exemplified by INQUERY, and those based on language modeling. INQUERY, as a query net model, allows the easy incorporation of query operators, including a synonym operator, which has proven to be extremely useful in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), in an approach often called structured query translation. In contrast, language models incorporate translation probabilities into a unified framework. We compare the two approaches on Arabic and Spanish data sets, using two kinds of bilingual dictionaries––one derived from a conventional dictionary, and one derived from a parallel corpus. We find that structured query processing gives slightly better results when queries are not expanded. On the other hand, when queries are expanded, language modeling gives better results, but only when using a probabilistic dictionary derived from a parallel corpus.We pursue two additional issues inherent in the comparison of structured query processing with language modeling. The first concerns query expansion, and the second is the role of translation probabilities. We compare conventional expansion techniques (pseudo-relevance feedback) with relevance modeling, a new IR approach which fits into the formal framework of language modeling. We find that relevance modeling and pseudo-relevance feedback achieve comparable levels of retrieval and that good translation probabilities confer a small but significant advantage.     

Improving probabilistic information retrieval by modeling burstiness of words

The classical probabilistic models attempt to capture the ad hoc information retrieval problem within a rigorous probabilistic framework. It has long been recognized that the primary obstacle to the effective performance of the probabilistic models is the need to estimate a relevance model. The Dirichlet compound multinomial (DCM) distribution based on the Polya Urn scheme, which can also be considered as a hierarchical Bayesian model, is a more appropriate generative model than the traditional multinomial distribution for text documents. We explore a new probabilistic model based on the DCM distribution, which enables efficient retrieval and accurate ranking. Because the DCM distribution captures the dependency of repetitive word occurrences, the new probabilistic model based on this distribution is able to model the concavity of the score function more effectively. To avoid the empirical tuning of retrieval parameters, we design several parameter estimation algorithms to automatically set model parameters. Additionally, we propose a pseudo-relevance feedback algorithm based on the mixture modeling of the Dirichlet compound multinomial distribution to further improve retrieval accuracy. Finally, our experiments show that both the baseline probabilistic retrieval algorithm based on the DCM distribution and the corresponding pseudo-relevance feedback algorithm outperform the existing language modeling systems on several TREC retrieval tasks. The main objective of this research is to develop an effective probabilistic model based on the DCM distribution. A secondary objective is to provide a thorough understanding of the probabilistic retrieval model by a theoretical understanding of various text distribution assumptions.     

Probabilistic co-relevance for query-sensitive similarity measurement in information retrieval

Interdocument similarities are the fundamental information source required in cluster-based retrieval, which is an advanced retrieval approach that significantly improves performance during information retrieval (IR). An effective similarity metric is query-sensitive similarity, which was introduced by Tombros and Rijsbergen as method to more directly satisfy the cluster hypothesis that forms the basis of cluster-based retrieval. Although this method is reported to be effective, existing applications of query-specific similarity are still limited to vector space models wherein there is no connection to probabilistic approaches. We suggest a probabilistic framework that defines query-sensitive similarity based on probabilistic co-relevance, where the similarity between two documents is proportional to the probability that they are both co-relevant to a specific given query. We further simplify the proposed co-relevance-based similarity by decomposing it into two separate relevance models. We then formulate all the requisite components for the proposed similarity metric in terms of scoring functions used by language modeling methods. Experimental results obtained using standard TREC test collections consistently showed that the proposed query-sensitive similarity measure performs better than term-based similarity and existing query-sensitive similarity in the context of Voorhees’ nearest neighbor test (NNT).     

Probabilistic learning for selective dissemination of information

New methods and new systems are needed to filter or to selectively distribute the increasing volume of electronic information being produced nowadays. An effective information filtering system is one that provides the exact information that fulfills user's interests with the minimum effort by the user to describe it. Such a system will have to be adaptive to the user changing interest. In this paper we describe and evaluate a learning model for information filtering which is an adaptation of the generalized probabilistic model of Information Retrieval. The model is based on the concept of `uncertainty sampling', a technique that allows for relevance feedback both on relevant and nonrelevant documents. The proposed learning model is the core of a prototype information filtering system called ProFile.     

A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments: Part 2

The paper combines a comprehensive account of the probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC Programme material. It presents the model from its foundations through its logical development to cover more aspects of retrieval data and a wider range of system functions. Each step in the argument is matched by comparative retrieval tests, to provide a single coherent account of a major line of research. The experiments demonstrate, for a large test collection, that the probabilistic model is effective and robust, and that it responds appropriately, with major improvements in performance, to key features of retrieval situations.Part 1 covers the foundations and the model development for document collection and relevance data, along with the test apparatus. Part 2 covers the further development and elaboration of the model, with extensive testing, and briefly considers other environment conditions and tasks, model training, concluding with comparisons with other approaches and an overall assessment.Data and results tables for both parts are given in Part 1. Key results are summarised in Part 2.     

An exploration of ranking models and feedback method for related entity finding

Most existing search engines focus on document retrieval. However, information needs are certainly not limited to finding relevant documents. Instead, a user may want to find relevant entities such as persons and organizations. In this paper, we study the problem of related entity finding. Our goal is to rank entities based on their relevance to a structured query, which specifies an input entity, the type of related entities and the relation between the input and related entities. We first discuss a general probabilistic framework, derive six possible retrieval models to rank the related entities, and then compare these models both analytically and empirically. To further improve performance, we study the problem of feedback in the context of related entity finding. Specifically, we propose a mixture model based feedback method that can utilize the pseudo feedback entities to estimate an enriched model for the relation between the input and related entities. Experimental results over two standard TREC collections show that the derived relation generation model combined with a relation feedback method performs better than other models.     

Managing structured queries in probabilistic XML retrieval systems

Focusing on the context of XML retrieval, in this paper we propose a general methodology for managing structured queries (involving both content and structure) within any given structured probabilistic information retrieval system which is able to compute posterior probabilities of relevance for structural components given a non-structured query (involving only query terms but not structural restrictions). We have tested our proposal using two specific information retrieval systems (Garnata and PF/Tijah), and the structured document collections from the last six editions of the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX).     

A risk minimization framework for information retrieval

This paper presents a probabilistic information retrieval framework in which the retrieval problem is formally treated as a statistical decision problem. In this framework, queries and documents are modeled using statistical language models, user preferences are modeled through loss functions, and retrieval is cast as a risk minimization problem. We discuss how this framework can unify existing retrieval models and accommodate systematic development of new retrieval models. As an example of using the framework to model non-traditional retrieval problems, we derive retrieval models for subtopic retrieval, which is concerned with retrieving documents to cover many different subtopics of a general query topic. These new models differ from traditional retrieval models in that they relax the traditional assumption of independent relevance of documents.     

Stochastic model predictive control for linear systems with unbounded additive uncertainties

This paper presents two stochastic model predictive control methods for linear time-invariant systems subject to unbounded additive uncertainties. The new methods are developed by formulating the chance constraints into deterministic form, which are treated in analogy with robust constraints, by using the probabilistic reachable set. The first one is the time-varying tube-based stochastic model predictive control algorithm, which is designed by employing the time-varying probabilistic reachable sets as tubes. The second one is the constant tube-based stochastic model predictive control algorithm, which is developed by enforcing a constant tightened constraint in the entire prediction horizon. In addition, the soft constraints are proposed to associate with the state initialization in the algorithms to enhance the feasibility. The algorithm feasibility and closed-loop stability results are provided. The efficacy of the approaches is demonstrated by means of numerical simulations.     

A noise-tolerant graphical model for ranking

This paper studies how to learn accurate ranking functions from noisy training data for information retrieval. Most previous work on learning to rank assumes that the relevance labels in the training data are reliable. In reality, however, the labels usually contain noise due to the difficulties of relevance judgments and several other reasons. To tackle the problem, in this paper we propose a novel approach to learning to rank, based on a probabilistic graphical model. Considering that the observed label might be noisy, we introduce a new variable to indicate the true label of each instance. We then use a graphical model to capture the joint distribution of the true labels and observed labels given features of documents. The graphical model distinguishes the true labels from observed labels, and is specially designed for ranking in information retrieval. Therefore, it helps to learn a more accurate model from noisy training data. Experiments on a real dataset for web search show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform previous approaches.     

A new robust relevance model in the language model framework

In this paper, a new robust relevance model is proposed that can be applied to both pseudo and true relevance feedback in the language-modeling framework for document retrieval. There are at least three main differences between our new relevance model and other relevance models. The proposed model brings back the original query into the relevance model by treating it as a short, special document, in addition to a number of top-ranked documents returned from the first round retrieval for pseudo feedback, or a number of relevant documents for true relevance feedback. Second, instead of using a uniform prior as in the original relevance model proposed by Lavrenko and Croft, documents are assigned with different priors according to their lengths (in terms) and ranks in the first round retrieval. Third, the probability of a term in the relevance model is further adjusted by its probability in a background language model. In both pseudo and true relevance cases, we have compared the performance of our model to that of the two baselines: the original relevance model and a linear combination model. Our experimental results show that the proposed new model outperforms both of the two baselines in terms of mean average precision.     

Tracking user-role evolution via topic modeling in community question answering

Community question answering (CQA) services that enable users to ask and answer questions are popular on the internet. Each user can simultaneously play the roles of asker and answerer. Some work has aimed to model the roles of users for potential applications in CQA. However, the dynamic characteristics of user roles have not been addressed. User roles vary over time. This paper explores user representation by tracking user-role evolution, which could enable several potential applications in CQA, such as question recommendation. We believe this paper is the first to track user-role evolution and investigate its influence on the performance of question recommendation in CQA. Moreover, we propose a time-aware role model (TRM) to effectively track user-role evolution. With different independence assumptions, two variants of TRM are developed. Finally, we present the TRM-based approach to question recommendation, which provides a mechanism to naturally integrate the user-role evolution with content relevance between the answerer and the question into a unified probabilistic framework. Experiments using real-world data from Stack Overflow show that (1) the TRM is valid for tracking user-role evolution, and (2) compared with baselines utilizing role based methods, our TRM-based approach consistently and significantly improves the performance of question recommendation. Hence, our approach could enable several potential applications in CQA.     

A retrospective study of a hybrid document-context based retrieval model

This paper describes our novel retrieval model that is based on contexts of query terms in documents (i.e., document contexts). Our model is novel because it explicitly takes into account of the document contexts instead of implicitly using the document contexts to find query expansion terms. Our model is based on simulating a user making relevance decisions, and it is a hybrid of various existing effective models and techniques. It estimates the relevance decision preference of a document context as the log-odds and uses smoothing techniques as found in language models to solve the problem of zero probabilities. It combines these estimated preferences of document contexts using different types of aggregation operators that comply with different relevance decision principles (e.g., aggregate relevance principle). Our model is evaluated using retrospective experiments (i.e., with full relevance information), because such experiments can (a) reveal the potential of our model, (b) isolate the problems of the model from those of the parameter estimation, (c) provide information about the major factors affecting the retrieval effectiveness of the model, and (d) show that whether the model obeys the probability ranking principle. Our model is promising as its mean average precision is 60–80% in our experiments using different TREC ad hoc English collections and the NTCIR-5 ad hoc Chinese collection. Our experiments showed that (a) the operators that are consistent with aggregate relevance principle were effective in combining the estimated preferences, and (b) that estimating probabilities using the contexts in the relevant documents can produce better retrieval effectiveness than using the entire relevant documents.     

A relevance model for a data warehouse contextualized with documents

This paper presents a relevance model to rank the facts of a data warehouse that are described in a set of documents retrieved with an information retrieval (IR) query. The model is based in language modeling and relevance modeling techniques. We estimate the relevance of the facts by the probability of finding their dimensions values and the query keywords in the documents that are relevant to the query. The model is the core of the so-called contextualized warehouse, which is a new kind of decision support system that combines structured data sources and document collections. The paper evaluates the relevance model with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) TREC test subcollection and a self-constructed fact database.     

Field independent probabilistic model for clustering multi-field documents

We propose a new finite mixture model for clustering multiple-field documents, such as scientific literature with distinct fields: title, abstract, keywords, main text and references. This probabilistic model, which we call field independent clustering model (FICM), incorporates the distinct word distributions of each field to integrate the discriminative abilities of each field as well as to select the most suitable component probabilistic model for each field. We evaluated the performance of FICM by applying it to the problem of clustering three-field (title, abstract and MeSH) biomedical documents from TREC 2004 and 2005 Genomics tracks, and two-field (title and abstract) news reports from Reuters-21578. Experimental results showed that FICM outperformed the classical multinomial model and the multivariate Bernoulli model, being at a statistically significant level for all the three collections. These results indicate that FICM outperformed widely-used probabilistic models for document clustering by considering the characteristics of each field. We further showed that the component model, which is consistent with the nature of the corresponding field, achieved a better performance and considering the diversity of model setting also gave a further performance improvement. An extended abstract of parts of the work presented in this paper has appeared in Zhu et al. [Zhu, S., Takigawa, I., Zhang, S., & Mamitsuka, H. (2007). A probabilistic model for clustering text documents with multiple fields. In Proceedings of the 29th European conference on information retrieval, ECIR 2007. Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 4425, pp. 331–342)].     

A probabilistic model for stemmer generation

In this paper we will present a language-independent probabilistic model which can automatically generate stemmers. Stemmers can improve the retrieval effectiveness of information retrieval systems, however the designing and the implementation of stemmers requires a laborious amount of effort due to the fact that documents and queries are often written or spoken in several different languages. The probabilistic model proposed in this paper aims at the development of stemmers used for several languages. The proposed model describes the mutual reinforcement relationship between stems and derivations and then provides a probabilistic interpretation. A series of experiments shows that the stemmers generated by the probabilistic model are as effective as the ones based on linguistic knowledge.     

Finite-time extended dissipativity control for interval type-2 fuzzy systems with resilient memory sampled-data controller

In this work, the finite-time extended dissipativity of the interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy systems with probabilistic time-varying delay is discussed via resilient memory sampled-data control. To enable the stability analysis and control combination, an IT2 fuzzy model is employed to represent the dynamics of nonlinear systems of which the parameter uncertainties are taken by IT2 membership functions distinguish by the lower and upper membership functions. The main objective of this paper is to design a resilient memory sampled-data controller such that the resulting closed-loop system is finite-time bounded and satisfies extended dissipative performance. Moreover, the solvability of the derived conditions not only depends on the size of the delay but also on the probabilistic distribution of the delay taking values in some interval, thus probabilistic delay protocol is encountered in the IT2 fuzzy model. By employing suitable Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional (LKF) along with Wirtinger-based inequality, a set of sufficient conditions ensuring the finite-time extended dissipative performance for IT2 fuzzy systems are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, two numerical simulations are presented to reveal the effectiveness of the developed technique.     

中小企业技术创新对成长性影响——科技型企业不同于非科技型企业?

技术创新对科技型和非科技型中小企业成长性的作用具有一定重要意义,基于414家中小上市公司数据,本文首次针对两类企业分别构建了技术创新模型,分析技术创新对二者成长性的影响。结果表明:研发投入程度越大,企业创新环境越好,专利数量越多,人力资源的投入强度越大的中小企业技术创新能力越强;对于科技型中小企业,其技术创新与成长性呈显著正相关关系,而非科技型中小企业其相关性不明显,针对该情况,本文结合实际现状对中小企业的发展提出了建议。     

Probabilistic topic modeling in multilingual settings: An overview of its methodology and applications

Probabilistic topic models are unsupervised generative models which model document content as a two-step generation process, that is, documents are observed as mixtures of latent concepts or topics, while topics are probability distributions over vocabulary words. Recently, a significant research effort has been invested into transferring the probabilistic topic modeling concept from monolingual to multilingual settings. Novel topic models have been designed to work with parallel and comparable texts. We define multilingual probabilistic topic modeling (MuPTM) and present the first full overview of the current research, methodology, advantages and limitations in MuPTM. As a representative example, we choose a natural extension of the omnipresent LDA model to multilingual settings called bilingual LDA (BiLDA). We provide a thorough overview of this representative multilingual model from its high-level modeling assumptions down to its mathematical foundations. We demonstrate how to use the data representation by means of output sets of (i) per-topic word distributions and (ii) per-document topic distributions coming from a multilingual probabilistic topic model in various real-life cross-lingual tasks involving different languages, without any external language pair dependent translation resource: (1) cross-lingual event-centered news clustering, (2) cross-lingual document classification, (3) cross-lingual semantic similarity, and (4) cross-lingual information retrieval. We also briefly review several other applications present in the relevant literature, and introduce and illustrate two related modeling concepts: topic smoothing and topic pruning. In summary, this article encompasses the current research in multilingual probabilistic topic modeling. By presenting a series of potential applications, we reveal the importance of the language-independent and language pair independent data representations by means of MuPTM. We provide clear directions for future research in the field by providing a systematic overview of how to link and transfer aspect knowledge across corpora written in different languages via the shared space of latent cross-lingual topics, that is, how to effectively employ learned per-topic word distributions and per-document topic distributions of any multilingual probabilistic topic model in various cross-lingual applications.     

市场竞争中的两种对策模型

随着经济生活中的各种冲突竞争日益增多，如何分析这些错综复杂现象，对策论作为一种数学工具对此提供了分析框架。本文结合案例，介绍了两种基本模型：二人零和对策和二人非零和对策，并对这些模型的结构、模型解及其实际背景进行了讨论，指出：（１）与零和对策相比，非零和对策更接近于现实的经济生活；（２）对策论对经济竞争冲突结果的求出，从根本上说是一种概率预示；（３）对策论可以激发人们以一种新的方法思考理解经济生活中的竞争冲突现象。