Utilizing passage-based language models for ad hoc document retrieval

To cope with the fact that, in the ad hoc retrieval setting, documents relevant to a query could contain very few (short) parts (passages) with query-related information, researchers proposed passage-based document ranking approaches. We show that several of these retrieval methods can be understood, and new ones can be derived, using the same probabilistic model. We use language-model estimates to instantiate specific retrieval algorithms, and in doing so present a novel passage language model that integrates information from the containing document to an extent controlled by the estimated document homogeneity. Several document-homogeneity measures that we present yield passage language models that are more effective than the standard passage model for basic document retrieval and for constructing and utilizing passage-based relevance models; these relevance models also outperform a document-based relevance model. Finally, we demonstrate the merits in using the document-homogeneity measures for integrating document-query and passage-query similarity information for document retrieval.     

Credibility-inspired ranking for blog post retrieval

Credibility of information refers to its believability or the believability of its sources. We explore the impact of credibility-inspired indicators on the task of blog post retrieval, following the intuition that more credible blog posts are preferred by searchers. Based on a previously introduced credibility framework for blogs, we define several credibility indicators, and divide them into post-level (e.g., spelling, timeliness, document length) and blog-level (e.g., regularity, expertise, comments) indicators. The retrieval task at hand is precision-oriented, and we hypothesize that the use of credibility-inspired indicators will positively impact precision. We propose to use ideas from the credibility framework in a reranking approach to the blog post retrieval problem: We introduce two simple ways of reranking the top n of an initial run. The first approach, Credibility-inspired reranking, simply reranks the top n of a baseline based on the credibility-inspired score. The second approach, Combined reranking, multiplies the credibility-inspired score of the top n results by their retrieval score, and reranks based on this score. Results show that Credibility-inspired reranking leads to larger improvements over the baseline than Combined reranking, but both approaches are capable of improving over an already strong baseline. For Credibility-inspired reranking the best performance is achieved using a combination of all post-level indicators. Combined reranking works best using the post-level indicators combined with comments and pronouns. The blog-level indicators expertise, regularity, and coherence do not contribute positively to the performance, although analysis shows that they can be useful for certain topics. Additional analysis shows that a relative small value of n (15–25) leads to the best results, and that posts that move up the ranking due to the integration of reranking based on credibility-inspired indicators do indeed appear to be more credible than the ones that go down.     

Document vector representations for feature extraction in multi-stage document ranking

We consider a multi-stage retrieval architecture consisting of a fast, “cheap” candidate generation stage, a feature extraction stage, and a more “expensive” reranking stage using machine-learned models. In this context, feature extraction can be accomplished using a document vector index, a mapping from document ids to document representations. We consider alternative organizations of such a data structure for efficient feature extraction: design choices include how document terms are organized, how complex term proximity features are computed, and how these structures are compressed. In particular, we propose a novel document-adaptive hashing scheme for compactly encoding term ids. The impact of alternative designs on both feature extraction speed and memory footprint is experimentally evaluated. Overall, results show that our architecture is comparable in speed to using a traditional positional inverted index but requires less memory overall, and offers additional advantages in terms of flexibility.     

A probability ranking principle for interactive information retrieval

The classical Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) forms the theoretical basis for probabilistic Information Retrieval (IR) models, which are dominating IR theory since about 20 years. However, the assumptions underlying the PRP often do not hold, and its view is too narrow for interactive information retrieval (IIR). In this article, a new theoretical framework for interactive retrieval is proposed: The basic idea is that during IIR, a user moves between situations. In each situation, the system presents to the user a list of choices, about which s/he has to decide, and the first positive decision moves the user to a new situation. Each choice is associated with a number of cost and probability parameters. Based on these parameters, an optimum ordering of the choices can the derived—the PRP for IIR. The relationship of this rule to the classical PRP is described, and issues of further research are pointed out.

The uncertain representation ranking framework for concept-based video retrieval

Concept based video retrieval often relies on imperfect and uncertain concept detectors. We propose a general ranking framework to define effective and robust ranking functions, through explicitly addressing detector uncertainty. It can cope with multiple concept-based representations per video segment and it allows the re-use of effective text retrieval functions which are defined on similar representations. The final ranking status value is a weighted combination of two components: the expected score of the possible scores, which represents the risk-neutral choice, and the scores’ standard deviation, which represents the risk or opportunity that the score for the actual representation is higher. The framework consistently improves the search performance in the shot retrieval task and the segment retrieval task over several baselines in five TRECVid collections and two collections which use simulated detectors of varying performance.     

Noun phrases in interactive query expansion and document ranking

The paper presents several techniques for selecting noun phrases for interactive query expansion following pseudo-relevance feedback and a new phrase-based document ranking method. A combined syntactico-statistical method was used for the selection of phrases for query expansion. Several statistical measures of phrase selection were evaluated. Experiments were also conducted studying the effectiveness of noun phrases in document ranking. One of the major problems in phrase-based document retrieval is weighting of overlapping and non-contiguous word sequences in documents. The paper presents a new method of phrase weighting, which addressed this problem, and its evaluation on the TREC dataset.     

Contents and time sensitive document ranking of scientific literature

A new link-based document ranking framework is devised with at its heart, a contents and time sensitive random literature explorer designed to more accurately model the behaviour of readers of scientific documents. In particular, our ranking framework dynamically adjusts its random walk parameters according to both contents and age of encountered documents, thus incorporating the diversity of topics and how they evolve over time into the score of a scientific publication. Our random walk framework results in a ranking of scientific documents which is shown to be more effective in facilitating literature exploration than PageRank measured against a proxy gold standard based on papers’ potential usefulness in facilitating later research. One of its many strengths lies in its practical value in reliably retrieving and placing promisingly useful papers at the top of its ranking.     

A novel neighborhood based document smoothing model for information retrieval

In this paper, a novel neighborhood based document smoothing model for information retrieval has been proposed. Lexical association between terms is used to provide a context sensitive indexing weight to the document terms, i.e. the term weights are redistributed based on the lexical association with the context words. A generalized retrieval framework has been presented and it has been shown that the vector space model (VSM), divergence from randomness (DFR), Okapi Best Matching 25 (BM25) and the language model (LM) based retrieval frameworks are special cases of this generalized framework. Being proposed in the generalized retrieval framework, the neighborhood based document smoothing model is applicable to all the indexing models that use the term-document frequency scheme. The proposed smoothing model is as efficient as the baseline retrieval frameworks at runtime. Experiments over the TREC datasets show that the neighborhood based document smoothing model consistently improves the retrieval performance of VSM, DFR, BM25 and LM and the improvements are statistically significant.     

Distribution algorithms for document allocation in multiprocessor information retrieval systems

Distributed memory information retrieval systems have been used as a means of managing the vast volume of documents in an information retrieval system, and to improve query response time. However, proper allocation of documents plays an important role in improving the performance of such systems. Maximising the amount of parallelism can be achieved by distributing the documents, while the inter-node communication cost is minimised by avoiding documents distribution. Unfortunately, these two factors contradict each other. Finding an optimal allocation satisfying the above objectives is referred to as distributed memory document allocation problem (DDAP), and it is an NP-Complete problem. Heuristic algorithms are usually employed to find an optimal solution to this problem. Genetic algorithm is one such algorithms. In this paper, a genetic algorithm is developed to find an optimal document allocation for DDAP. Several well-known network topologies are investigated to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. The approach relies on the fact that documents of an information retrieval system are clustered by some arbitrary method. The advantages of a clustered document approach specially in a distributed memory information retrieval system are well-known.Since genetic algorithms work with a set of candidate solutions, parallelisation based on a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) paradigm seems to be the natural way to obtain a speedup. Using this approach, the population of strings is distributed among the processing elements. Each string is processed independently. The performance gain comes from the parallel execution of the strings, and hence, it is heavily dependent on the population size. The approach is favoured for genetic algorithms' applications where the parameter set for a particular run is well-known in advance, and where such applications require a big population size to solve the problem. DDAP fits nicely into the above requirements. The aim of the parallelisation is two-fold: the first one is to speedup the allocation process in DDAP which usually consists of thousands of documents and has to use a big population size, and second, it can be seen as an attempt to port the genetic algorithm's processes into SIMD machines.     

Linear feature-based models for information retrieval

There have been a number of linear, feature-based models proposed by the information retrieval community recently. Although each model is presented differently, they all share a common underlying framework. In this paper, we explore and discuss the theoretical issues of this framework, including a novel look at the parameter space. We then detail supervised training algorithms that directly maximize the evaluation metric under consideration, such as mean average precision. We present results that show training models in this way can lead to significantly better test set performance compared to other training methods that do not directly maximize the metric. Finally, we show that linear feature-based models can consistently and significantly outperform current state of the art retrieval models with the correct choice of features.

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Extended structural relevance framework: a framework for evaluating structured document retrieval

A structured document retrieval (SDR) system aims to minimize the effort users spend to locate relevant information by retrieving parts of documents. To evaluate the range of SDR tasks, from element to passage to tree retrieval, numerous task-specific measures have been proposed. This has resulted in SDR evaluation measures that cannot easily be compared with respect to each other and across tasks. In previous work, we defined the SDR task of tree retrieval where passage and element are special cases. In this paper, we look in greater detail into tree retrieval to identify the main components of SDR evaluation: relevance, navigation, and redundancy. Our goal is to evaluate SDR within a single probabilistic framework based on these components. This framework, called Extended Structural Relevance (ESR), calculates user expected gain in relevant information depending on whether it is seen via hits (relevant results retrieved), unseen via misses (relevant results not retrieved), or possibly seen via near-misses (relevant results accessed via navigation). We use these expectations as parameters to formulate evaluation measures for tree retrieval. We then demonstrate how existing task-specific measures, if viewed as tree retrieval, can be formulated, computed and compared using our framework. Finally, we experimentally validate ESR across a range of SDR tasks.     

认知弹性理论在文献检索教学中的应用

在探讨认知弹性理论核心观点的基础上,讨论了其在文献检索教学构建的适应性与特点,设计出一个基于该理论的、使用者倾向的文献检索教学模式结构,并着重探讨了该模式在文献检索教学的应用。     

Extreme value theory applied to document retrieval from large collections

We consider text retrieval applications that assign query-specific relevance scores to documents drawn from particular collections. Such applications represent a primary focus of the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), where the participants compare the empirical performance of different approaches. P^(K), the proportion of the top K documents that are relevant, is a popular measure of retrieval effectiveness. Participants in the TREC Very Large Corpus track have observed that when the target is a random sample from a collection, P^(K) is substantially smaller than when the target is the entire collection. Hawking and Robertson (2003) confirmed this finding in a number of experimental settings. Hawking et al. (1999) posed as an open research question the cause of this phenomenon and proposed five possible explanatory hypotheses. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis that sheds some light on these hypotheses and complements the experimental work of Hawking and Robertson (2003). We will also introduce C^(L), contamination at L, the number of irrelevant documents amongst the top L relevant documents, and describe its properties. Our analysis shows that while P^(K) typically will increase with collection size, the phenomenon is not universal. That is, the asymptotic behavior of P^(K) and C^(L) depends on the score distributions and relative proportions of relevant and irrelevant documents in the collection. While this article went to press, Yehuda Vardi passed away. We dedicate the paper to his memory.     

基于局域网的检索教学模式与系统构建

基于局域网的多媒体辅助教学系统是由硬件环境、软件系统和教学资源库组成的有机整体,本文结合文检课辅助教学系统构建与实施的研究,分析了教学资源与课程教学的整合模式,探讨了远程教学中文检课教学的模式与特点,并指出网络环境下辅助教学系统的发展方向.     

试论文献检索课远程教育中的版权问题

章对献检索课远程教育中涉及的主要版权问题进行了分析，并从法律调整和自律保护两大方面提出了对策。     

An analysis on document length retrieval trends in language modeling smoothing

Document length is widely recognized as an important factor for adjusting retrieval systems. Many models tend to favor the retrieval of either short or long documents and, thus, a length-based correction needs to be applied for avoiding any length bias. In Language Modeling for Information Retrieval, smoothing methods are applied to move probability mass from document terms to unseen words, which is often dependant upon document length. In this article, we perform an in-depth study of this behavior, characterized by the document length retrieval trends, of three popular smoothing methods across a number of factors, and its impact on the length of documents retrieved and retrieval performance. First, we theoretically analyze the Jelinek–Mercer, Dirichlet prior and two-stage smoothing strategies and, then, conduct an empirical analysis. In our analysis we show how Dirichlet prior smoothing caters for document length more appropriately than Jelinek–Mercer smoothing which leads to its superior retrieval performance. In a follow up analysis, we posit that length-based priors can be used to offset any bias in the length retrieval trends stemming from the retrieval formula derived by the smoothing technique. We show that the performance of Jelinek–Mercer smoothing can be significantly improved by using such a prior, which provides a natural and simple alternative to decouple the query and document modeling roles of smoothing. With the analysis of retrieval behavior conducted in this article, it is possible to understand why the Dirichlet Prior smoothing performs better than the Jelinek–Mercer, and why the performance of the Jelinek–Mercer method is improved by including a length-based prior.

Google学术搜索与百链云图书馆文献检索比较研究

Google学术搜索与百链云图书馆均可以对异构资源进行统一检索,文章对二者的信息来源、检索界面、检索方法及检索结果进行对比,并对其特色功能进行分析,为用户进行一站式学术检索提供指导和帮助。     

关于建立科技查新信息资源保障体系的探讨

本文论述了科技查新中文献信息资源保障的重要性，并探讨了建立科技查新的文献信息资源保障体系的可行性、总体思路、内涵及措施。