Query expansion methods for collaborative information retrieval

Information Retrieval Systeme haben in den letzten Jahren nur geringe Verbesserungen in der Retrieval Performance erzielt. Wir arbeiten an neuen Ans?tzen, dem sogenannten Collaborativen Information Retrieval (CIR), die das Potential haben, starke Verbesserungen zu erreichen. CIR ist die Methode, mit der durch Ausnutzen von Informationen aus früheren Anfragen die Retrieval Peformance für die aktuelle Anfrage verbessert wird. Wir haben ein eingeschr?nktes Szenario, in dem nur alte Anfragen und dazu relevante Antwortdokumente zur Verfügung stehen. Neue Ans?tze für Methoden der Query Expansion führen unter diesen Bedingungen zu Verbesserungen der Retrieval Performance . The accuracy of ad-hoc document retrieval systems has reached a stable plateau in the last few years. We are working on so-called collaborative information retrieval (CIR) systems which have the potential to overcome the current limits. We define CIR as a task, where an information retrieval (IR) system uses information gathered from previous search processes from one or several users to improve retrieval performance for the current user searching for information. We focus on a restricted setting in CIR in which only old queries and correct answer documents to these queries are available for improving a new query. For this restricted setting we propose new approaches for query expansion procedures. We show how CIR methods can improve overall IR performance.

CR Subject Classification H.3.3     

基于Apriori改进算法的局部反馈查询扩展

提出面向查询扩展的Apriori改进算法，采用三种剪枝策略，极大提高挖掘效率；针对现有查询扩展存在的缺陷，提出基于Apriori改进算法的局部反馈查询扩展算法，该算法用Apriori改进算法对前列初检文档进行词间关联规则挖掘，提取含有原查询词的词间关联规则，构造规则库，从库中提取扩展词，实现查询扩展。实验结果表明该算法能够提高信息检索性能，与现有算法比较，在相同查全率水平级下其平均查准率有了明显提高。     

信息检索系统中的用户相关反馈机制

从理论上论述了向量空间模型和概率模型是如何通过相关反馈机制来提高检索性能，还讨论了在不同模型中，相关反馈是如何实现查询式扩展和检索词权值调整的。     

Knowledge-based query expansion to support scenario-specific retrieval of medical free text

In retrieving medical free text, users are often interested in answers pertinent to certain scenarios that correspond to common tasks performed in medical practice, e.g., treatment or diagnosis of a disease. A major challenge in handling such queries is that scenario terms in the query (e.g., treatment) are often too general to match specialized terms in relevant documents (e.g., chemotherapy). In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based query expansion method that exploits the UMLS knowledge source to append the original query with additional terms that are specifically relevant to the query's scenario(s). We compared the proposed method with traditional statistical expansion that expands terms which are statistically correlated but not necessarily scenario specific. Our study on two standard testbeds shows that the knowledge-based method, by providing scenario-specific expansion, yields notable improvements over the statistical method in terms of average precision-recall. On the OHSUMED testbed, for example, the improvement is more than 5% averaging over all scenario-specific queries studied and about 10% for queries that mention certain scenarios, such as treatment of a disease and differential diagnosis of a symptom/disease.

特征词抽取和相关性融合的伪相关反馈查询扩展

针对现有信息检索系统中存在的词不匹配问题,提出一种基于特征词抽取和相关性融合的伪相关反馈查询扩展算法以及新的扩展词权重计算方法。该算法从前列n篇初检局部文档中抽取与原查询相关的特征词,根据特征词在初检文档集中出现的频度以及与原查询的相关度,将特征词确定为最终的扩展词实现查询扩展。实验结果表明,该方法有效,并能提高和改善信息检索性能。     

信息检索扩展技术研究

本文针对信息检索在查询扩展方面的不足,提出了一种结合本体理论和用户相关反馈技术的查询扩展方法。以FirteX作为检索平台, 选取WordNet作为本体扩展资源来验证本文所提出的查询扩展算法,实现结果表明该方法比基于余弦相似性的查询扩展方法在平均查全率、平均查准率方面有更大的优点。     

A merging strategy proposal: The 2-step retrieval status value method

A usual strategy to implement CLIR (Cross-Language Information Retrieval) systems is the so-called query translation approach. The user query is translated for each language present in the multilingual collection in order to compute an independent monolingual information retrieval process per language. Thus, this approach divides documents according to language. In this way, we obtain as many different collections as languages. After searching in these corpora and obtaining a result list per language, we must merge them in order to provide a single list of retrieved articles. In this paper, we propose an approach to obtain a single list of relevant documents for CLIR systems driven by query translation. This approach, which we call 2-step RSV (RSV: Retrieval Status Value), is based on the re-indexing of the retrieval documents according to the query vocabulary, and it performs noticeably better than traditional methods. The proposed method requires query vocabulary alignment: given a word for a given query, we must know the translation or translations to the other languages. Because this is not always possible, we have researched on a mixed model. This mixed model is applied in order to deal with queries with partial word-level alignment. The results prove that even in this scenario, 2-step RSV performs better than traditional merging methods.     

An empirical study of gene synonym query expansion in biomedical information retrieval

Due to the heavy use of gene synonyms in biomedical text, people have tried many query expansion techniques using synonyms in order to improve performance in biomedical information retrieval. However, mixed results have been reported. The main challenge is that it is not trivial to assign appropriate weights to the added gene synonyms in the expanded query; under-weighting of synonyms would not bring much benefit, while overweighting some unreliable synonyms can hurt performance significantly. So far, there has been no systematic evaluation of various synonym query expansion strategies for biomedical text. In this work, we propose two different strategies to extend a standard language modeling approach for gene synonym query expansion and conduct a systematic evaluation of these methods on all the available TREC biomedical text collections for ad hoc document retrieval. Our experiment results show that synonym expansion can significantly improve the retrieval accuracy. However, different query types require different synonym expansion methods, and appropriate weighting of gene names and synonym terms is critical for improving performance.

基于伪相关反馈的跨语言查询扩展

相关反馈是一种重要的查询重构技术,本文分析了两类相关反馈技术,一是按用户是否参与可分为伪相关反馈和交互式相关反馈,二是按作用于查询的方式可分为查询扩展与检索词重新加权.在此基础上,本文重点探讨了将相关反馈技术应用于跨语言信息检索,提出了翻译前查询扩展、翻译后查询扩展、翻译前与翻译后相结合的查询扩展三种方法.最后,本文通过伪相关反馈实验对这三种方法进行了比较,实验结果显示,三种跨语言查询扩展方法都能够有效地提高检索结果的精度,其中翻译后查询扩展方法相对更优越.此外,查询式的长度对不同跨语言查询扩展方法产生着不同程度的影响.     

信息检索系统中的相关反馈技术

本文论述了布尔模型、向量空间模型以及概率模型中所采用的相关反馈技术,其中主要集中于检索词权值调整以及查询扩展等两项技术。作者还讨论了相关反馈技术对检索性能影响的评估方法,并提出了相关反馈在实际应用中需要解决的问题。     

基于用户相关反馈的带结构语义的XML查询词扩展

在XML文档的信息检索中,检索质量不高的一个主要原因是用户难以提出准确描述其查询意图的查询表达式,而查询扩展技术被认为是可以帮助用户构建符合其查询意图的查询表达式.本文在XML信息检索中提出了基于用户相关反馈的查询扩展技术,在查询扩展中除了考虑词频因素外还充分考虑了XML文档的结构特点对于扩展查询词选取的影响,包括文档中元素的语义权重、元素所在层次和词项与初始查询词间的距离因素对于扩展查询词选取的影响.实验证明本方法是可行的,且能较好地提高检索结果的准确率.     

Query Expansion with Long-Span Collocates

The paper presents two novel approaches to query expansion with long-span collocates—words, significantly co-occurring in topic-size windows with query terms. In the first approach—global collocation analysis—collocates of query terms are extracted from the entire collection, in the second—local collocation analysis—from a subset of retrieved documents. The significance of association between collocates was estimated using modified Mutual Information and Z score. The techniques were tested using the Okapi IR system. The effect of different parameters on performance was evaluated: window size, number of expansion terms, measures of collocation significance and types of expansion terms. We present performance results of these techniques and provide comparison with related approaches.     

Two-stage statistical language models for text database selection

As the number and diversity of distributed Web databases on the Internet exponentially increase, it is difficult for user to know which databases are appropriate to search. Given database language models that describe the content of each database, database selection services can provide assistance in locating databases relevant to the information needs of users. In this paper, we propose a database selection approach based on statistical language modeling. The basic idea behind the approach is that, for databases that are categorized into a topic hierarchy, individual language models are estimated at different search stages, and then the databases are ranked by the similarity to the query according to the estimated language model. Two-stage smoothed language models are presented to circumvent inaccuracy due to word sparseness. Experimental results demonstrate that such a language modeling approach is competitive with current state-of-the-art database selection approaches.     

Incremental Relevance Feedback in Japanese Text Retrieval

The application of relevance feedback techniques has been shown to improve retrieval performance for a number of information retrieval tasks. This paper explores incremental relevance feedback for ad hoc Japanese text retrieval; examining, separately and in combination, the utility of term reweighting and query expansion using a probabilistic retrieval model. Retrieval performance is evaluated in terms of standard precision-recall measures, and also using number-to-view graphs. Experimental results, on the standard BMIR-J2 Japanese language retrieval collection, show that both term reweighting and query expansion improve retrieval performance. This is reflected in improvements in both precision and recall, but also a reduction in the average number of documents which must be viewed to find a selected number of relevant items. In particular, using a simple simulation of user searching, incremental application of relevance information is shown to lead to progressively improved retrieval performance and an overall reduction in the number of documents that a user must view to find relevant ones.     

Exploring criteria for successful query expansion in the genomic domain

Query Expansion is commonly used in Information Retrieval to overcome vocabulary mismatch issues, such as synonymy between the original query terms and a relevant document. In general, query expansion experiments exhibit mixed results. Overall TREC Genomics Track results are also mixed; however, results from the top performing systems provide strong evidence supporting the need for expansion. In this paper, we examine the conditions necessary for optimal query expansion performance with respect to two system design issues: IR framework and knowledge source used for expansion. We present a query expansion framework that improves Okapi baseline passage MAP performance by 185%. Using this framework, we compare and contrast the effectiveness of a variety of biomedical knowledge sources used by TREC 2006 Genomics Track participants for expansion. Based on the outcome of these experiments, we discuss the success factors required for effective query expansion with respect to various sources of term expansion, such as corpus-based cooccurrence statistics, pseudo-relevance feedback methods, and domain-specific and domain-independent ontologies and databases. Our results show that choice of document ranking algorithm is the most important factor affecting retrieval performance on this dataset. In addition, when an appropriate ranking algorithm is used, we find that query expansion with domain-specific knowledge sources provides an equally substantive gain in performance over a baseline system.