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.     

Multiple query evaluation based on an enhanced genetic algorithm

Recent studies suggest that significant improvement in information retrieval performance can be achieved by combining multiple representations of an information need. The paper presents a genetic approach that combines the results from multiple query evaluations. The genetic algorithm aims to optimise the overall relevance estimate by exploring different directions of the document space. We investigate ways to improve the effectiveness of the genetic exploration by combining appropriate techniques and heuristics known in genetic theory or in the IR field. Indeed, the approach uses a niching technique to solve the relevance multimodality problem, a relevance feedback technique to perform genetic transformations on query formulations and evolution heuristics in order to improve the convergence conditions of the genetic process. The effectiveness of the global approach is demonstrated by comparing the retrieval results obtained by both genetic multiple query evaluation and classical single query evaluation performed on a subset of TREC-4 using the Mercure IRS. Moreover, experimental results show the positive effect of the various techniques integrated to our genetic algorithm model.     

Combining the evidence of different relevance feedback methods for information retrieval

It has been known that retrieval effectiveness can be significantly improved by combining multiple evidence from different query or document representations, or multiple retrieval techniques. In this paper, we combine multiple evidence from different relevance feedback methods, and investigate various aspects of the combination. We first generate multiple query vectors for a given information problem in a fully automatic way by expanding an initial query vector with various relevance feedback methods. We then perform retrieval runs for the multiple query vectors, and combine the retrieval results. Experimental results show that combining the evidence of different relevance feedback methods can lead to substantial improvements of retrieval effectiveness.     

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.     

Unique-order interpolative coding for fast querying and space-efficient indexing in information retrieval systems

This paper presents a size reduction method for the inverted file, the most suitable indexing structure for an information retrieval system (IRS). We notice that in an inverted file the document identifiers for a given word are usually clustered. While this clustering property can be used in reducing the size of the inverted file, good compression as well as fast decompression must both be available. In this paper, we present a method that can facilitate coding and decoding processes for interpolative coding using recursion elimination and loop unwinding. We call this method the unique-order interpolative coding. It can calculate the lower and upper bounds of every document identifier for a binary code without using a recursive process, hence the decompression time can be greatly reduced. Moreover, it also can exploit document identifier clustering to compress the inverted file efficiently. Compared with the other well-known compression methods, our method provides fast decoding speed and excellent compression. This method can also be used to support a self-indexing strategy. Therefore our research work in this paper provides a feasible way to build a fast and space-economical IRS.     

文本局部特征的向量表示研究

文本的特征表示是文本信息组织和检索的关键.经典的向量空间模型是最重要的一种技术,但它也有一些缺陷,如不能表示特征词在文本中的空间分布信息.为了提高文本描述的精度及检索能力,笔者给出了权重计算的修正方法.该方法在考虑特征项全局信息的基础上增加了其局部特征.它保留了传统VsM方法的特点,同时有效地将局部信息集成到一起,最后给出了一个具体的方案与相应算法.     

Neural embedding-based indices for semantic search

Traditional information retrieval techniques that primarily rely on keyword-based linking of the query and document spaces face challenges such as the vocabulary mismatch problem where relevant documents to a given query might not be retrieved simply due to the use of different terminology for describing the same concepts. As such, semantic search techniques aim to address such limitations of keyword-based retrieval models by incorporating semantic information from standard knowledge bases such as Freebase and DBpedia. The literature has already shown that while the sole consideration of semantic information might not lead to improved retrieval performance over keyword-based search, their consideration enables the retrieval of a set of relevant documents that cannot be retrieved by keyword-based methods. As such, building indices that store and provide access to semantic information during the retrieval process is important. While the process for building and querying keyword-based indices is quite well understood, the incorporation of semantic information within search indices is still an open challenge. Existing work have proposed to build one unified index encompassing both textual and semantic information or to build separate yet integrated indices for each information type but they face limitations such as increased query process time. In this paper, we propose to use neural embeddings-based representations of term, semantic entity, semantic type and documents within the same embedding space to facilitate the development of a unified search index that would consist of these four information types. We perform experiments on standard and widely used document collections including Clueweb09-B and Robust04 to evaluate our proposed indexing strategy from both effectiveness and efficiency perspectives. Based on our experiments, we find that when neural embeddings are used to build inverted indices; hence relaxing the requirement to explicitly observe the posting list key in the indexed document: (a) retrieval efficiency will increase compared to a standard inverted index, hence reduces the index size and query processing time, and (b) while retrieval efficiency, which is the main objective of an efficient indexing mechanism improves using our proposed method, retrieval effectiveness also retains competitive performance compared to the baseline in terms of retrieving a reasonable number of relevant documents from the indexed corpus.     

情报检索的发展——情报学世纪回眸之一

本文站在世纪之交的2000年，通过情报检索系统历史的回顾，描述了情报检索的发展历程。从手工情报检索、机械情报检索、计算机情报检索到网络情报检索系统四个阶段，阐述了各个时期情报检索语言、情报检索技术和情报检索数据库的发展状况，说明计算机等新型信息技术的使用是促进情报检索现代化的基本动力，基于因特网的网络情报检索系统将是情报检索系统的发展模式。     

TOFIR: A tool of facilitating information retrieval – introduce a visual retrieval model

The paper introduces a new method for the visualization of information retrieval. Angle attributes of a document are used to construct the angle–angle-based visual space. The retrieved documents are perceived, several traditional information retrieval evaluation models are visualized and interpreted, and new non-traditional retrieval control means based on the model are explored in the two-dimensional angle display space. The impacts of different metrics on the visualization of information retrieval are discussed. Ambiguity, future research directions and other relevant issues are also addressed.     

基于Lucene的信息检索的研究与应用

快速有效地索引企业累积的大量的信息资源,是提供高质量检索服务的基础。Lucene是一个用Java写的全文索引引擎工具包,访问索引时间快,支持多用户访问,可以跨平台使用。本文研究了Lucene和中文切分词技术,分析了Lucene的索引原理,实现了一个基于kene并支持中英文文档检索的应用实例。     

Unsupervised graph-based rank aggregation for improved retrieval

This paper presents a robust and comprehensive graph-based rank aggregation approach, used to combine results of isolated ranker models in retrieval tasks. The method follows an unsupervised scheme, which is independent of how the isolated ranks are formulated. Our approach is able to combine arbitrary models, defined in terms of different ranking criteria, such as those based on textual, image or hybrid content representations.We reformulate the ad-hoc retrieval problem as a document retrieval based on fusion graphs, which we propose as a new unified representation model capable of merging multiple ranks and expressing inter-relationships of retrieval results automatically. By doing so, we claim that the retrieval system can benefit from learning the manifold structure of datasets, thus leading to more effective results. Another contribution is that our graph-based aggregation formulation, unlike existing approaches, allows for encapsulating contextual information encoded from multiple ranks, which can be directly used for ranking, without further computations and post-processing steps over the graphs. Based on the graphs, a novel similarity retrieval score is formulated using an efficient computation of minimum common subgraphs. Finally, another benefit over existing approaches is the absence of hyperparameters.A comprehensive experimental evaluation was conducted considering diverse well-known public datasets, composed of textual, image, and multimodal documents. Performed experiments demonstrate that our method reaches top performance, yielding better effectiveness scores than state-of-the-art baseline methods and promoting large gains over the rankers being fused, thus demonstrating the successful capability of the proposal in representing queries based on a unified graph-based model of rank fusions.     

Using cause-effect relations in text to improve information retrieval precision

This study attempted to use semantic relations expressed in text, in particular cause-effect relations, to improve information retrieval effectiveness. The study investigated whether the information obtained by matching cause-effect relations expressed in documents with the cause-effect relations expressed in users’ queries can be used to improve document retrieval results, in comparison to using just keyword matching without considering relations.An automatic method for identifying and extracting cause-effect information in Wall Street Journal text was developed. Causal relation matching was found to yield a small but significant improvement in retrieval results when the weights used for combining the scores from different types of matching were customized for each query. Causal relation matching did not perform better than word proximity matching (i.e. matching pairs of causally related words in the query with pairs of words that co-occur within document sentences), but the best results were obtained when causal relation matching was combined with word proximity matching. The best kind of causal relation matching was found to be one in which one member of the causal relation (either the cause or the effect) was represented as a wildcard that could match with any word.     

Document indexing: a concept-based approach to term weight estimation

Traditional index weighting approaches for information retrieval from texts depend on the term frequency based analysis of the text contents. A shortcoming of these indexing schemes, which consider only the occurrences of the terms in a document, is that they have some limitations in extracting semantically exact indexes that represent the semantic content of a document. To address this issue, we developed a new indexing formalism that considers not only the terms in a document, but also the concepts. In this approach, concept clusters are defined and a concept vector space model is proposed to represent the semantic importance degrees of lexical items and concepts within a document. Through an experiment on the TREC collection of Wall Street Journal documents, we show that the proposed method outperforms an indexing method based on term frequency (TF), especially in regard to the few highest-ranked documents. Moreover, the index term dimension was 80% lower for the proposed method than for the TF-based method, which is expected to significantly reduce the document search time in a real environment.     

基于Lucene的非结构化文档全文检索系统研究与实现

如何在海量的非结构文档内容中准确、快捷找到自己所需要的信息,是信息检索技术的研究重点。全文检索是现代信息检索技术一个非常重要的分支,是解决非结构化数据检索需求的重要技术手段。以已发布的各类通信业务管理规范的全文检索需求为切入点,设计并实现了适用于国家级气象信息化业务管理的非结构化文档全文检索系统。该系统基于Java技术,并采用Lucene技术框架,对业务规范信息进行了分析和重新数据组织,确保良好的检索时效与准确率。系统应用后能快速应对业务变化,在已有的大量的规定、规范、标准和公文函件中迅速、准确、全面地查找有关资料信息,帮助用户准确把握气象信息化发展脉络。     

Re-ranking model based on document clusters

In this paper, we describe a model of information retrieval system that is based on a document re-ranking method using document clusters. In the first step, we retrieve documents based on the inverted-file method. Next, we analyze the retrieved documents using document clusters, and re-rank them. In this step, we use static clusters and dynamic cluster view. Consequently, we can produce clusters that are tailored to characteristics of the query. We focus on the merits of the inverted-file method and cluster analysis. In other words, we retrieve documents based on the inverted-file method and analyze all terms in document based on the cluster analysis. By these two steps, we can get the retrieved results which are made by the consideration of the context of all terms in a document as well as query terms. We will show that our method achieves significant improvements over the method based on similarity search ranking alone.     

Mathematical model of time-effective information retrieval system based on the theory of fuzzy sets

Search patterns of documents and information requests are their better or worse representatives only, so it is important to carry on examinations on possibilities of designing self-learning information retrieval systems. Another important question is to elaborate such an organization of document search pattern set as to obtain an acceptable response time of the information system to a given information request.A self-learning process of the proposed information system consists in the determination—on a set of document and information request search patterns—of the similarity relation according to L. A. Zadeh.The organization of a set of document search patterns proposed in the paper ensures the limitation of document search pattern set searching process—when retrieving a response to a given information request—to one (or several) subset from previously determined subsets. This makes the information system response time acceptable. The proposed information retrieval strategy is discussed in terms of fuzzy sets.     

Using context information in structured document retrieval: an approach based on influence diagrams

In this paper we present an Information Retrieval System (IRS) which is able to work with structured document collections. The model is based on the influence diagrams formalism: a generalization of Bayesian Networks that provides a visual representation of a decision problem. These offer an intuitive way to identify and display the essential elements of the domain (the structured document components and their usefulness) and also how these are related to each other. They have also associated quantitative knowledge that measures the strength of the interactions. By means of this approach, we shall present structured retrieval as a decision-making problem. Two different models have been designed: SID (Simple Influence Diagram) and CID (Context-based Influence Diagram). The main difference between these two models is that the latter also takes into account influences provided by the context in which each structural component is located.     

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.