Adapting information retrieval systems to user queries

Users enter queries that are short as well as long. The aim of this work is to evaluate techniques that can enable information retrieval (IR) systems to automatically adapt to perform better on such queries. By adaptation we refer to (1) modifications to the queries via user interaction, and (2) detecting that the original query is not a good candidate for modification. We show that the former has the potential to improve mean average precision (MAP) of long and short queries by 40% and 30% respectively, and that simple user interaction can help towards this goal. We observed that after inspecting the options presented to them, users frequently did not select any. We present techniques in this paper to determine beforehand the utility of user interaction to avoid this waste of time and effort. We show that our techniques can provide IR systems with the ability to detect and avoid interaction for unpromising queries without a significant drop in overall performance.     

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).     

Integrating textual and visual information for cross-language image retrieval: A trans-media dictionary approach

This paper explores the integration of textual and visual information for cross-language image retrieval. An approach which automatically transforms textual queries into visual representations is proposed. First, we mine the relationships between text and images and employ the mined relationships to construct visual queries from textual ones. Then, the retrieval results of textual and visual queries are combined. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conduct English monolingual and Chinese–English cross-language retrieval experiments. The selection of suitable textual query terms to construct visual queries is the major issue. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves retrieval performance, and use of nouns is appropriate to generate visual queries.     

Parsimonious translation models for information retrieval

In the KL divergence framework, the extended language modeling approach has a critical problem of estimating a query model, which is the probabilistic model that encodes the user’s information need. For query expansion in initial retrieval, the translation model had been proposed to involve term co-occurrence statistics. However, the translation model was difficult to apply, because the term co-occurrence statistics must be constructed in the offline time. Especially in a large collection, constructing such a large matrix of term co-occurrences statistics prohibitively increases time and space complexity. In addition, reliable retrieval performance cannot be guaranteed because the translation model may comprise noisy non-topical terms in documents. To resolve these problems, this paper investigates an effective method to construct co-occurrence statistics and eliminate noisy terms by employing a parsimonious translation model. The parsimonious translation model is a compact version of a translation model that can reduce the number of terms containing non-zero probabilities by eliminating non-topical terms in documents. Through experimentation on seven different test collections, we show that the query model estimated from the parsimonious translation model significantly outperforms not only the baseline language modeling, but also the non-parsimonious models.     

Detecting verbose queries and improving information retrieval

Although most of the queries submitted to search engines are composed of a few keywords and have a length that ranges from three to six words, more than 15% of the total volume of the queries are verbose, introduce ambiguity and cause topic drifts. We consider verbosity a different property of queries from length since a verbose query is not necessarily long, it might be succinct and a short query might be verbose. This paper proposes a methodology to automatically detect verbose queries and conditionally modify queries. The methodology proposed in this paper exploits state-of-the-art classification algorithms, combines concepts from a large linguistic database and uses a topic gisting algorithm we designed for verbose query modification purposes. Our experimental results have been obtained using the TREC Robust track collection, thirty topics classified by difficulty degree, four queries per topic classified by verbosity and length, and human assessment of query verbosity. Our results suggest that the methodology for query modification conditioned to query verbosity detection and topic gisting is significantly effective and that query modification should be refined when topic difficulty and query verbosity are considered since these two properties interact and query verbosity is not straightforwardly related to query length.     

Enhancing query translation with relevance feedback in translingual information retrieval

As an effective technique for improving retrieval effectiveness, relevance feedback (RF) has been widely studied in both monolingual and translingual information retrieval (TLIR). The studies of RF in TLIR have been focused on query expansion (QE), in which queries are reformulated before and/or after they are translated. However, RF in TLIR actually not only can help select better query terms, but also can enhance query translation by adjusting translation probabilities and even resolving some out-of-vocabulary terms. In this paper, we propose a novel relevance feedback method called translation enhancement (TE), which uses the extracted translation relationships from relevant documents to revise the translation probabilities of query terms and to identify extra available translation alternatives so that the translated queries are more tuned to the current search. We studied TE using pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) and interactive relevance feedback (IRF). Our results show that TE can significantly improve TLIR with both types of relevance feedback methods, and that the improvement is comparable to that of query expansion. More importantly, the effects of translation enhancement and query expansion are complementary. Their integration can produce further improvement, and makes TLIR more robust for a variety of queries.     

Relevance feedback and cross-language information retrieval

This paper presents a study of relevance feedback in a cross-language information retrieval environment. We have performed an experiment in which Portuguese speakers are asked to judge the relevance of English documents; documents hand-translated to Portuguese and documents automatically translated to Portuguese. The goals of the experiment were to answer two questions (i) how well can native Portuguese searchers recognise relevant documents written in English, compared to documents that are hand translated and automatically translated to Portuguese; and (ii) what is the impact of misjudged documents on the performance improvement that can be achieved by relevance feedback. Surprisingly, the results show that machine translation is as effective as hand translation in aiding users to assess relevance in the experiment. In addition, the impact of misjudged documents on the performance of RF is overall just moderate, and varies greatly for different query topics.     

The Dilution/Concentration conditions for cross-language information retrieval models

Experimental results of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) do not indicate why a model fails or how a model could be improved. One basic research question is thus whether it is possible to provide conditions by which one can evaluate any existing or new CLIR strategy analytically and one can improve the design of CLIR models. Inspired by the heuristics in monolingual IR, we introduce in this paper Dilution/Concentration (D/C) conditions to characterize good CLIR models based on direct intuitions under artificial settings. The conditions, derived from first principles in CLIR, generalize the idea of query structuring approach. Empirical results with state-of-the-art CLIR models show that when a condition is not satisfied, it often indicates non-optimality of the method. In general, we find that the empirical performance of a retrieval formula is tightly related to how well it satisfies the conditions. Lastly, we propose, by following the D/C conditions, several novel CLIR models based on the information-based models, which again shows that the D/C conditions are efficient to feature good CLIR models.     

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.     

Term disambiguation techniques based on target document collection for cross-language information retrieval: An empirical comparison of performance between techniques

Dictionary-based query translation for cross-language information retrieval often yields various translation candidates having different meanings for a source term in the query. This paper examines methods for solving the ambiguity of translations based on only the target document collections. First, we discuss two kinds of disambiguation technique: (1) one is a method using term co-occurrence statistics in the collection, and (2) a technique based on pseudo-relevance feedback. Next, these techniques are empirically compared using the CLEF 2003 test collection for German to Italian bilingual searches, which are executed by using English language as a pivot. The experiments showed that a variation of term co-occurrence based techniques, in which the best sequence algorithm for selecting translations is used with the Cosine coefficient, is dominant, and that the PRF method shows comparable high search performance, although statistical tests did not sufficiently support these conclusions. Furthermore, we repeat the same experiments for the case of French to Italian (pivot) and English to Italian (non-pivot) searches on the same CLEF 2003 test collection in order to verity our findings. Again, similar results were observed except that the Dice coefficient outperforms slightly the Cosine coefficient in the case of disambiguation based on term co-occurrence for English to Italian searches.     

On the role of user-centred evaluation in the advancement of interactive information retrieval

This paper discusses the role of user-centred evaluations as an essential method for researching interactive information retrieval. It draws mainly on the work carried out during the Clarity Project where different user-centred evaluations were run during the lifecycle of a cross-language information retrieval system. The iterative testing was not only instrumental to the development of a usable system, but it enhanced our knowledge of the potential, impact, and actual use of cross-language information retrieval technology. Indeed the role of the user evaluation was dual: by testing a specific prototype it was possible to gain a micro-view and assess the effectiveness of each component of the complex system; by cumulating the result of all the evaluations (in total 43 people were involved) it was possible to build a macro-view of how cross-language retrieval would impact on users and their tasks. By showing the richness of results that can be acquired, this paper aims at stimulating researchers into considering user-centred evaluations as a flexible, adaptable and comprehensive technique for investigating non-traditional information access systems.     

Using query logs to establish vocabularies in distributed information retrieval

Users of search engines express their needs as queries, typically consisting of a small number of terms. The resulting search engine query logs are valuable resources that can be used to predict how people interact with the search system. In this paper, we introduce two novel applications of query logs, in the context of distributed information retrieval. First, we use query log terms to guide sampling from uncooperative distributed collections. We show that while our sampling strategy is at least as efficient as current methods, it consistently performs better. Second, we propose and evaluate a pruning strategy that uses query log information to eliminate terms. Our experiments show that our proposed pruning method maintains the accuracy achieved by complete indexes, while decreasing the index size by up to 60%. While such pruning may not always be desirable in practice, it provides a useful benchmark against which other pruning strategies can be measured.     

Mining a Persian–English comparable corpus for cross-language information retrieval

Knowledge acquisition and bilingual terminology extraction from multilingual corpora are challenging tasks for cross-language information retrieval. In this study, we propose a novel method for mining high quality translation knowledge from our constructed Persian–English comparable corpus, University of Tehran Persian–English Comparable Corpus (UTPECC). We extract translation knowledge based on Term Association Network (TAN) constructed from term co-occurrences in same language as well as term associations in different languages. We further propose a post-processing step to do term translation validity check by detecting the mistranslated terms as outliers. Evaluation results on two different data sets show that translating queries using UTPECC and using the proposed methods significantly outperform simple dictionary-based methods. Moreover, the experimental results show that our methods are especially effective in translating Out-Of-Vocabulary terms and also expanding query words based on their associated terms.     

Document replication strategies for geographically distributed web search engines

Large-scale web search engines are composed of multiple data centers that are geographically distant to each other. Typically, a user query is processed in a data center that is geographically close to the origin of the query, over a replica of the entire web index. Compared to a centralized, single-center search engine, this architecture offers lower query response times as the network latencies between the users and data centers are reduced. However, it does not scale well with increasing index sizes and query traffic volumes because queries are evaluated on the entire web index, which has to be replicated and maintained in all data centers. As a remedy to this scalability problem, we propose a document replication framework in which documents are selectively replicated on data centers based on regional user interests. Within this framework, we propose three different document replication strategies, each optimizing a different objective: reducing the potential search quality loss, the average query response time, or the total query workload of the search system. For all three strategies, we consider two alternative types of capacity constraints on index sizes of data centers. Moreover, we investigate the performance impact of query forwarding and result caching. We evaluate our strategies via detailed simulations, using a large query log and a document collection obtained from the Yahoo! web search engine.     

Query expansion with terms selected using lexical cohesion analysis of documents

We present new methods of query expansion using terms that form lexical cohesive links between the contexts of distinct query terms in documents (i.e., words surrounding the query terms in text). The link-forming terms (link-terms) and short snippets of text surrounding them are evaluated in both interactive and automatic query expansion (QE). We explore the effectiveness of snippets in providing context in interactive query expansion, compare query expansion from snippets vs. whole documents, and query expansion following snippet selection vs. full document relevance judgements. The evaluation, conducted on the HARD track data of TREC 2005, suggests that there are considerable advantages in using link-terms and their surrounding short text snippets in QE compared to terms selected from full-texts of documents.     

Bipolar queries in textual information retrieval: A new perspective

A new concept of a bipolar query against collections of textual documents, i.e. in the context of information retrieval (IR), is introduced using recent developments in bipolar information modeling and bipolar database queries. Specifically, a particular approach to bipolar queries with an explicit “and possibly” type of an aggregation operator is used. An effective and efficient processing of such bipolar queries using standard IR data structures is briefly discussed. The bipolar queries proposed combine a flexibility provided by fuzzy logic with a more sophisticated representation of user preferences and intentions. This combination can make the search of vast resources of textual document, notably those available via the Internet, more intelligent.     

跨语言信息检索初探

随着互联网的发展，网络成为人们获取信息的重要来源，但是语言的藩篱却限制了人们获取信息的自由。跨语言信息检索应运而生。本文将从理论和实践两方面对跨语言信息检索进行论述：理论方面分析了实现跨语言信息检索的方法和策略；实践方面则以Mulinex系统和Google搜索引擎为例，介绍了跨语言信息检索在实际中的应用。     

跨语言信息检索查询翻译词典自动构建研究

双语机读词典是基于查询翻译的跨语言信息检索中的常用资源,但是传统的手工构建词典的方法费时费力,本文利用统计方法从英汉句对齐平行语料库中自动获取翻译词典,以用于查询翻译过程中。