Searching strategies for the Hungarian language

This paper reports on the underlying IR problems encountered when dealing with the complex morphology and compound constructions found in the Hungarian language. It describes evaluations carried out on two general stemming strategies for this language, and also demonstrates that a light stemming approach could be quite effective. Based on searches done on the CLEF test collection, we find that a more aggressive suffix-stripping approach may produce better MAP. When compared to an IR scheme without stemming or one based on only a light stemmer, we find the differences to be statistically significant. When compared with probabilistic, vector-space and language models, we find that the Okapi model results in the best retrieval effectiveness. The resulting MAP is found to be about 35% better than the classical tf idf approach, particularly for very short requests. Finally, we demonstrate that applying an automatic decompounding procedure for both queries and documents significantly improves IR performance (+10%), compared to word-based indexing strategies.     

Fast exact maximum likelihood estimation for mixture of language model

Language modeling is an effective and theoretically attractive probabilistic framework for text information retrieval. The basic idea of this approach is to estimate a language model of a given document (or document set), and then do retrieval or classification based on this model. A common language modeling approach assumes the data D is generated from a mixture of several language models. The core problem is to find the maximum likelihood estimation of one language model mixture, given the fixed mixture weights and the other language model mixture. The EM algorithm is usually used to find the solution.     

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).     

Bias–variance analysis in estimating true query model for information retrieval

The estimation of query model is an important task in language modeling (LM) approaches to information retrieval (IR). The ideal estimation is expected to be not only effective in terms of high mean retrieval performance over all queries, but also stable in terms of low variance of retrieval performance across different queries. In practice, however, improving effectiveness can sacrifice stability, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose to study this tradeoff from a new perspective, i.e., the bias–variance tradeoff, which is a fundamental theory in statistics. We formulate the notion of bias–variance regarding retrieval performance and estimation quality of query models. We then investigate several estimated query models, by analyzing when and why the bias–variance tradeoff will occur, and how the bias and variance can be reduced simultaneously. A series of experiments on four TREC collections have been conducted to systematically evaluate our bias–variance analysis. Our approach and results will potentially form an analysis framework and a novel evaluation strategy for query language modeling.     

Indexing and stemming approaches for the Czech language

This paper describes and evaluates various stemming and indexing strategies for the Czech language. Based on Czech test-collection, we have designed and evaluated two stemming approaches, a light and a more aggressive one. We have compared them with a no stemming scheme as well as a language-independent approach (n-gram). To evaluate the suggested solutions we used various IR models, including Okapi, Divergence from Randomness (DFR), a statistical language model (LM) as well as the classical tf idf vector-space approach. We found that the Divergence from Randomness paradigm tend to propose better retrieval effectiveness than the Okapi, LM or tf idf models, the performance differences were however statistically significant only with the last two IR approaches. Ignoring the stemming reduces generally the MAP by more than 40%, and these differences are always significant. Finally, if our more aggressive stemmer tends to show the best performance, the differences in performance with a light stemmer are not statistically significant.     

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.     

A novel term weighting scheme based on discrimination power obtained from past retrieval results

Term weighting for document ranking and retrieval has been an important research topic in information retrieval for decades. We propose a novel term weighting method based on a hypothesis that a term’s role in accumulated retrieval sessions in the past affects its general importance regardless. It utilizes availability of past retrieval results consisting of the queries that contain a particular term, retrieved documents, and their relevance judgments. A term’s evidential weight, as we propose in this paper, depends on the degree to which the mean frequency values for the relevant and non-relevant document distributions in the past are different. More precisely, it takes into account the rankings and similarity values of the relevant and non-relevant documents. Our experimental result using standard test collections shows that the proposed term weighting scheme improves conventional TF^*IDF and language model based schemes. It indicates that evidential term weights bring in a new aspect of term importance and complement the collection statistics based on TF^*IDF. We also show how the proposed term weighting scheme based on the notion of evidential weights are related to the well-known weighting schemes based on language modeling and probabilistic models.     

Probabilistic information retrieval model for a dependency structured indexing system

Most previous information retrieval (IR) models assume that terms of queries and documents are statistically independent from each other. However, conditional independence assumption is obviously and openly understood to be wrong, so we present a new method of incorporating term dependence into a probabilistic retrieval model by adapting a dependency structured indexing system using a dependency parse tree and Chow Expansion to compensate the weakness of the assumption. In this paper, we describe a theoretic process to apply the Chow Expansion to the general probabilistic models and the state-of-the-art 2-Poisson model. Through experiments on document collections in English and Korean, we demonstrate that the incorporation of term dependences using Chow Expansion contributes to the improvement of performance in probabilistic IR systems.     

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 syntactically-based query reformulation technique for information retrieval

Whereas in language words of high frequency are generally associated with low content [Bookstein, A., & Swanson, D. (1974). Probabilistic models for automatic indexing. Journal of the American Society of Information Science, 25(5), 312–318; Damerau, F. J. (1965). An experiment in automatic indexing. American Documentation, 16, 283–289; Harter, S. P. (1974). A probabilistic approach to automatic keyword indexing. PhD thesis, University of Chicago; Sparck-Jones, K. (1972). A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval. Journal of Documentation, 28, 11–21; Yu, C., & Salton, G. (1976). Precision weighting – an effective automatic indexing method. Journal of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), 23(1), 76–88], shallow syntactic fragments of high frequency generally correspond to lexical fragments of high content [Lioma, C., & Ounis, I. (2006). Examining the content load of part of speech blocks for information retrieval. In Proceedings of the international committee on computational linguistics and the association for computational linguistics (COLING/ACL 2006), Sydney, Australia]. We implement this finding to Information Retrieval, as follows. We present a novel automatic query reformulation technique, which is based on shallow syntactic evidence induced from various language samples, and used to enhance the performance of an Information Retrieval system. Firstly, we draw shallow syntactic evidence from language samples of varying size, and compare the effect of language sample size upon retrieval performance, when using our syntactically-based query reformulation (SQR) technique. Secondly, we compare SQR to a state-of-the-art probabilistic pseudo-relevance feedback technique. Additionally, we combine both techniques and evaluate their compatibility. We evaluate our proposed technique across two standard Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) English test collections, and three statistically different weighting models. Experimental results suggest that SQR markedly enhances retrieval performance, and is at least comparable to pseudo-relevance feedback. Notably, the combination of SQR and pseudo-relevance feedback further enhances retrieval performance considerably. These collective experimental results confirm the tenet that high frequency shallow syntactic fragments correspond to content-bearing lexical fragments.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

提问自动扩展算法——词为基础概念学习法

本文介绍了用以词为基础的概念学习法来自动扩展提问式的算法，该算法通过学习出现在当前提问中的概念描述词来逐词扩展提问。实验表明，与传统的向量空间检索模型及相关反馈算法相比，本算法能大大提高查全率和查准率。该方法可用于数字图书馆和WWW等的检索中。     

Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is a classical technique to improve search engine retrieval effectiveness, by closing the vocabulary gap between users’ query formulations and the relevant documents. While PRF is typically applied on the same target corpus as the final retrieval, in the past, external expansion techniques have sometimes been applied to obtain a high-quality pseudo-relevant feedback set using the external corpus. However, such external expansion approaches have only been studied for sparse (BoW) retrieval methods, and its effectiveness for recent dense retrieval methods remains under-investigated. Indeed, dense retrieval approaches such as ANCE and ColBERT, which conduct similarity search based on encoded contextualised query and document embeddings, are of increasing importance. Moreover, pseudo-relevance feedback mechanisms have been proposed to further enhance dense retrieval effectiveness. In particular, in this work, we examine the application of dense external expansion to improve zero-shot retrieval effectiveness, i.e. evaluation on corpora without further training. Zero-shot retrieval experiments with six datasets, including two TREC datasets and four BEIR datasets, when applying the MSMARCO passage collection as external corpus, indicate that obtaining external feedback documents using ColBERT can significantly improve NDCG@10 for the sparse retrieval (by upto 28%) and the dense retrieval (by upto 12%). In addition, using ANCE on the external corpus brings upto 30% NDCG@10 improvements for the sparse retrieval and upto 29% for the dense retrieval.     

基于数字信号处理理论的新型信息检索模型研究

【目的/意义】大数据时代对各领域信息检索系统检索模型查准率提出了较高要求。然而,现阶段对于传统检索模型的相关研究陷入瓶颈,表现为近若干年被提出的相关模型查准率提升幅度小,无法较好满足当前用户对于精准查询的需求。由此,高查准率检索模型亟待探索。近年来,一种基于数字信号处理理论的新型检索模型构架（Digital Signal Processing Framework:DSPF）被提出。同时,基于该模型构架的检索模型已被验证相较于传统检索模型具备显著的查准率优势。【方法/过程】据此,本研究基于数字信号处理理论构架,引入了经典概率模型F2LOG与F2EXP的词项权重计算方法,提出了模型DSPF-F2LOG与DSPF-F2EXP。为验证其查准率,本研究通过实验法,基于多种不同类型的标准数据集,采用多项查准率指标,将其与多个经典检索模型进行查准率对比分析。【结果/结论】实验结果表明,本研究所提模型较经典检索模型普遍具备更高查准率,且至少与当前查准率最高的基于数字信号处理理论的检索模型具备相当的查准率表现。本研究所提出的两个高查准率DSP模型可有效提高当前各领域信息检索系统对于非结构化文本的查准率。...     

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.     

On domain expertise-based roles in collaborative information retrieval

Collaborative information retrieval involves retrieval settings in which a group of users collaborates to satisfy the same underlying need. One core issue of collaborative IR models involves either supporting collaboration with adapted tools or developing IR models for a multiple-user context and providing a ranked list of documents adapted for each collaborator. In this paper, we introduce the first document-ranking model supporting collaboration between two users characterized by roles relying on different domain expertise levels. Specifically, we propose a two-step ranking model: we first compute a document-relevance score, taking into consideration domain expertise-based roles. We introduce specificity and novelty factors into language-model smoothing, and then we assign, via an Expectation–Maximization algorithm, documents to the best-suited collaborator. Our experiments employ a simulation-based framework of collaborative information retrieval and show the significant effectiveness of our model at different search levels.