Information Retrieval Performance Research Articles

Design of University Library and Information Management System Based on Big Data Fusion

In order to improve the ability of library and information management in colleges and universities, and improve intelligent retrieval level of books, a design method of library information management system is proposed based on big data fusion. The phase space reconstruction technology is used to reconstruct the feature of library and information. The feature quantity of semantic concept set of library information is extracted, and the classification storage and information retrieval of library information is carried out by fuzzy clustering method. The adaptive training method is used for feature fusion, and big data fusion of library and information is realized in high dimensional feature space. The data processing center is set up under the Linux kernel environment, the application program of the university library information management system is developed under the Linux kernel, and the VXI bus technology is used to transmit and schedule the university library information management information and data. Realize the software development and design of the school library information management system. The test results show that the design of university library information management system with this method has good information storage and scheduling ability, and it improves the performance of library information retrieval. In the information recall rate and recall rate and other indicators performance has an advantage.

Improved biomedical term selection in pseudo relevance feedback.

Biomedical information retrieval systems are becoming popular and complex due to massive amount of ever-growing biomedical literature. Users are unable to construct a precise and accurate query that represents the intended information in a clear manner. Therefore, query is expanded with the terms or features that retrieve more relevant information. Selection of appropriate expansion terms plays key role to improve the performance of retrieval task. We propose document frequency chi-square, a newer version of chi-square in pseudo relevance feedback for term selection. The effects of pre-processing on the performance of information retrieval specifically in biomedical domain are also depicted. On average, the proposed algorithm outperformed state-of-the-art term selection algorithms by 88% at pre-defined test points. Our experiments also conclude that, stemming cause a decrease in overall performance of the pseudo relevance feedback based information retrieval system particularly in biomedical domain.Database URL: http://biodb.sdau.edu.cn/gan/

RETRIEVAL—An Online Performance Evaluation Tool for Information Retrieval Methods

Performance evaluation is one of the main research topics in information retrieval. Evaluation metrics are used to quantify various performance aspects of a retrieval method. These metrics assist in identifying the optimum method for a specific retrieval challenge but also to allow its parameters fine-tuning in order to achieve a robust operation for a given set of requirements specification. In this work, we present RETRIEVAL, a Web-based integrated information retrieval performance evaluation platform. It offers a number of metrics that are popular within the scientific community, so as to compose an efficient framework for implementing performance evaluation. We discuss the functionality of RETRIEVAL by citing important aspects such as the data input approaches, the user-level performance metrics parameterization, the evaluation scenarios, the interactive plots, and the performance reports repository that offers both archiving and download functionalities.

Automatic Query Expansion for Arabic Text Retrieval

Query expansion (QE) is a successful idea to overcome the weaknesses in the information retrieval performance. The QE requires finding out appropriate word synonyms of the query words in a process that can be made automatically without any user intervention. The candidate synonyms should be associated with an accurate meaning (sense) of the original word. Arabic language is rich in multiple meanings and this requires using the so-called word sense disambiguation (WSD). WSD in general is a task to discover the correct sense of a word within context. To disambiguate the word sense, three different traditional semantic measures are tested in this work; they are called lch , wup , and path respectively. The proposed system uses these measures along with an automatic synonym selection method employed to expand the query. The proposed system outperforms the traditional baseline system that has no query expansion technique in a rate from 10% to 18 % and reduces the latency in an approximate rate from 0.232 to 0.283 second for each query.

Factors that influence query reformulations and search performance in health information retrieval: A multilevel modeling approach

Query reformulations can occur multiple times in a session, and queries observed in the same session tend to be related to each other. Due to the interdependent nature of queries in a session, it has been challenging to analyze query reformulation data while controlling for possible dependencies among queries. This study proposes a multilevel modeling approach in an attempt to analyze the effects of contextual factors and system features on types of query reformulation, as well as the relationship between types of query reformulation and search performance within a single research model. The results revealed that system features and users' educational background significantly influence users' query reformulation behaviors. Also, types of query reformulation had a significant impact on search performance. The main contribution of this study lies in that it adopted the multilevel modeling method to analyze query reformulation behavior while considering the nested structure of search session data. Multilevel analysis enables us to design an extensible research model to include both session‐level and action‐level factors, which provides a more extended understanding of the relationships among factors that influence query reformulation behavior and search performance. The multilevel modeling used in this study has practical implications for future query reformulation studies.

GitHub API Based QuantNet Mining Infrastructure in R

QuantNet being an online GitHub based organization is an integrated environment consisting of different types of statistics-related documents and program codes called Quantlets. The QuantNet Style Guide and the yamldebugger package allow a standardized audit and validation of YAML annotated software repositories within this organization. The behavior statistics of QuantNet users are measured with Web Metrics from Google Analytics. We show how the search queries obtained from Google’s metrics can be used in the test collections in order to calibrate and evaluate the information retrieval (IR) performance of QuantNet’s search engine called QuantNetXploRer. For that purpose, different text mining (TM) models will be examined by means of the new TManalyzer package. Further, we introduce the Validation Pipeline (Vali-PP) and apply it on the YAML data. Vali-PP is a functional multi-staged instrument for clustering analysis, providing multivariate statistical analysis of the co-occurrence distribution of driving factors of the pipeline. The new package rgithubS, which enables a GitHub wide search for code and repositories using the GitHub Search API and which is an essential element of the QuantNet Mining infrastructure, is briefly presented. The TManalyzer results show that for all considered single term queries the number of true positives is maximal in a latent semantic analysis model configuration (LSA50). The Vali-PP analysis indicates that the optimality of the combination LSA50 and hierarchical clustering (HC) applies to 70 − 90% of the cluster sizes for most of the considered quality indices. Further, we can infer that more accurate and comprehensive metadata increases the clustering quality. Subsequently, the findings of our experimental design are implemented into the QuantNetXploRer. The GitHub API driven QuantNetXploRer can be found and mined under http://www.quantlet.de

Semantically Enhanced Medical Information Retrieval System: A Tensor Factorization Based Approach

Medical information retrieval plays an increasingly important role to help physicians and domain experts to better access medical-related knowledge and information, and support decision making. Integrating the medical knowledge bases has the potential to improve the information retrieval performance through incorporating medical domain knowledge for relevance assessment. However, this is not a trivial task due to the challenges to effectively utilize the domain knowledge in the medical knowledge bases. In this paper, we proposed a novel medical information retrieval system with a two-stage query expansion strategy, which is able to effectively model and incorporate the latent semantic associations to improve the performance. This system consists of two parts. First, we applied a heuristic approach to enhance the widely used pseudo relevance feedback method for more effective query expansion, through iteratively expanding the queries to boost the similarity score between queries and documents. Second, to improve the retrieval performance with structured knowledge bases, we presented a latent semantic relevance model based on tensor factorization to identify semantic association patterns under sparse settings. These identified patterns are then used as inference paths to trigger knowledge-based query expansion in medical information retrieval. Experiments with the TREC CDS 2014 data set: 1) showed that the performance of the proposed system is significantly better than the baseline system and the systems reported in TREC CDS 2014 conference, and is comparable with the state-of-the-art systems and 2) demonstrated the capability of tensor-based semantic enrichment methods for medical information retrieval tasks.

Improving biomedical information retrieval by linear combinations of different query expansion techniques.

BackgroundBiomedical literature retrieval is becoming increasingly complex, and there is a fundamental need for advanced information retrieval systems. Information Retrieval (IR) programs scour unstructured materials such as text documents in large reserves of data that are usually stored on computers. IR is related to the representation, storage, and organization of information items, as well as to access. In IR one of the main problems is to determine which documents are relevant and which are not to the user’s needs. Under the current regime, users cannot precisely construct queries in an accurate way to retrieve particular pieces of data from large reserves of data. Basic information retrieval systems are producing low-quality search results. In our proposed system for this paper we present a new technique to refine Information Retrieval searches to better represent the user’s information need in order to enhance the performance of information retrieval by using different query expansion techniques and apply a linear combinations between them, where the combinations was linearly between two expansion results at one time. Query expansions expand the search query, for example, by finding synonyms and reweighting original terms. They provide significantly more focused, particularized search results than do basic search queries.ResultsThe retrieval performance is measured by some variants of MAP (Mean Average Precision) and according to our experimental results, the combination of best results of query expansion is enhanced the retrieved documents and outperforms our baseline by 21.06 %, even it outperforms a previous study by 7.12 %.ConclusionsWe propose several query expansion techniques and their combinations (linearly) to make user queries more cognizable to search engines and to produce higher-quality search results.

Weighted subspace modeling for semantic concept retrieval using gaussian mixture models

At the era of digital revolution, social media data are growing at an explosive speed. Thanks to the prevailing popularity of mobile devices with cheap costs and high resolutions as well as the ubiquitous Internet access provided by mobile carriers, Wi-Fi, etc., numerous numbers of videos and pictures are generated and uploaded to social media websites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter everyday. To efficiently and effectively search and retrieve information from the large amounts of multimedia data (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured), lots of algorithms and tools have been developed. Among them, a variety of data mining and machine learning methods have been explored and proposed and have shown their effectiveness and potentials in handling the growing requests to retrieve semantic information from those large-scale multimedia data. However, it is well-acknowledged that the performance of such multimedia semantic information retrieval is far from satisfactory, due to the challenges like rare events, data imbalance, etc. In this paper, a novel weighted subspace modeling framework is proposed that is based on the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and is able to effectively retrieve semantic concepts, even from the highly imbalanced datasets. Experimental results performed on two public-available benchmark datasets against our previous GMM-based subspace modeling method and the other prevailing counterparts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed weighted GMM-based subspace modeling framework with the improved retrieval performance in terms of the mean average precision (MAP) values.

Improving Information Retrieval Performance on OCRed Text in the Absence of Clean Text Ground Truth

OCR errors in text harm information retrieval performance. Much research has been reported on modelling and correction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors. Most of the prior work employ language dependent resources or training texts in studying the nature of errors. However, not much research has been reported that focuses on improving retrieval performance from erroneous text in the absence of training data. We propose a novel approach for detecting OCR errors and improving retrieval performance from the erroneous corpus in a situation where training samples are not available to model errors. In this paper we propose a method that automatically identifies erroneous term variants in the noisy corpus, which are used for query expansion, in the absence of clean text. We employ an effective combination of contextual information and string matching techniques. Our proposed approach automatically identifies the erroneous variants of query terms and consequently leads to improvement in retrieval performance through query expansion. Our proposed approach does not use any training data or any language specific resources like thesaurus for identification of error variants. It also does not expend any knowledge about the language except that the word delimiter is blank space. We have tested our approach on erroneous Bangla (Bengali in English) and Hindi FIRE collections, and also on TREC Legal IIT CDIP and TREC 5 Confusion track English corpora. Our proposed approach has achieved statistically significant improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines on most of the datasets.

COMPARISON OF VSM, GVSM, AND LSI IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FOR INDONESIAN TEXT

Vector space model (VSM) is an Information Retrieval (IR) system model that represents query and documents as n-dimension vector. GVSM is an expansion from VSM that represents the documents base on similarity value between query and minterm vector space of documents collection. Minterm vector is defined by the term in query. Therefore, in retrieving a document can be done base on word meaning inside the query. On the contrary, a document can consist the same information semantically. LSI is a method implemented in IR system to retrieve document base on overall meaning of users’ query input from a document, not based on each word translation. LSI uses a matrix algebra technique namely Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). This study discusses the performance of VSM, GVSM and LSI that are implemented on IR to retrieve Indonesian sentences document of .pdf, .doc and .docx extension type files, by using Nazief and Adriani stemming algorithm. Each method implemented either by thread or no-thread. Thread is implemented in preprocessing process in reading each document from document collection and stemming process either for query or documents. The quality of information retrieval performance is evaluated based-on time response, values of recall, precision, and F-measure were measured. The results show that for each method, the fastest execution time is .docx extension type file followed by .doc and .pdf. For the same document collection, the results show that time response for LSI is more faster, followed by GVSM then VSM. The average of recall value for VSM, GVSM and LSI are 82.86 %, 89.68 % and 84.93 % respectively. The average of precision value for VSM, GVSM and LSI are 64.08 %, 67.51 % and 62.08 % respectively. The average of F-measure value for VSM, GVSM and LSI are 71.95 %, 76.63 % and 71.02 % respectively. Implementation of multithread for preprocessing for VSM, GVSM, and LSI can increase average time response required is about 30.422%, 26.282%, and 31.821% respectively.

A study on Clustering Algorithms for XML Data Clustering

Nowadays mining meaningful information from large scale web documents is more important to satisfy the user demand. XML and RDF documents are supporting the semantic information retrieval to interpret and extract meaningful information for user query. XML documents have light weight code and logical structure, which facilitate easy exchange of data values and structure information in terms of knowledge. Many mining techniques and algorithms are used to enhance the performance of XML information Retrieval. Classification (Supervised Learning) and Clustering (Unsupervised Learning) are the preprocessing techniques used to grouping up the similar data objects based on similarity criteria. This paper presents the study on three clustering algorithms (k-means, EM, Tree Clustering) and its similarity measures on XML datasets. The three clustering algorithms are compared and tested with the same xml datasets for finding the best one to cluster XML documents.

Classified and clustered data constellation: An efficient approach of 3D urban data management

The growth of urban areas has resulted in massive urban datasets and difficulties handling and managing issues related to urban areas. Huge and massive datasets can degrade data retrieval and information analysis performance. In addition, the urban environment is very difficult to manage because it involves various types of data, such as multiple types of zoning themes in the case of urban mixed-use development. Thus, a special technique for efficient handling and management of urban data is necessary. This paper proposes a structure called Classified and Clustered Data Constellation (CCDC) for urban data management. CCDC operates on the basis of two filters: classification and clustering. To boost up the performance of information retrieval, CCDC offers a minimal percentage of overlap among nodes and coverage area to avoid repetitive data entry and multipath query. The results of tests conducted on several urban mixed-use development datasets using CCDC verify that it efficiently retrieves their semantic and spatial information. Further, comparisons conducted between CCDC and existing clustering and data constellation techniques, from the aspect of preservation of minimal overlap and coverage, confirm that the proposed structure is capable of preserving the minimum overlap and coverage area among nodes. Our overall results indicate that CCDC is efficient in handling and managing urban data, especially urban mixed-use development applications.

Studying the effect and treatment of misspelled queries in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

In contrast with their monolingual counterparts, little attention has been paid to the effects that misspelled queries have on the performance of Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) systems. The present work makes a first attempt to fill this gap by extending our previous work on monolingual retrieval in order to study the impact that the progressive addition of misspellings to input queries has, this time, on the output of CLIR systems. Two approaches for dealing with this problem are analyzed in this paper. Firstly, the use of automatic spelling correction techniques for which, in turn, we consider two algorithms: the first one for the correction of isolated words and the second one for a correction based on the linguistic context of the misspelled word. The second approach to be studied is the use of character n-grams both as index terms and translation units, seeking to take advantage of their inherent robustness and language-independence. All these approaches have been tested on a from-Spanish-to-English CLIR system, that is, Spanish queries on English documents. Real, user-generated spelling errors have been used under a methodology that allows us to study the effectiveness of the different approaches to be tested and their behavior when confronted with different error rates. The results obtained show the great sensitiveness of classic word-based approaches to misspelled queries, although spelling correction techniques can mitigate such negative effects. On the other hand, the use of character n-grams provides great robustness against misspellings.

Integrated Searching Technique for IR from Web Repository

The volume of unstructured text and hypertext data is increasing exponentially over that of well organized structured data in web data repositories. These spectacular data assets with increasing volume of repositories is generating challenges in efficient access of data to produce information by way of processing as well as extracting patterns by way of web mining. The effective and efficient retrieval as well as mining hidden patterns in a large volume of unstructured data as well as hypertext data has opened a window of research on web data mining. The undertaken research work is motivated on the centralized thought of exploratory research along with experimental justification to achieve research targets in planned research track. The research work initially carried out by the literature review of web data mining and information retrieval techniques through its models. The proposed work dealt with an integrated approach in searching technique to retrieve information from web data repository. The proposed model Amalgamate Web Search Methodology (AWSM) increases the level of Information Retrieval performance by integrating Exact, Relative and Adaptive search.

Effects of Information Access Cost and Accountability on Medical Residents' Information Retrieval Strategy and Performance During Prehandover Preparation: Evidence From Interview and Simulation Study.

We aimed to examine the effects of information access cost and accountability on medical residents' information retrieval strategy and performance during prehandover preparation. Prior studies observing doctors' prehandover practices witnessed the use of memory-intensive strategies when retrieving patient information. These strategies impose potential threats to patient safety as human memory is prone to errors. Of interest in this work are the underlying determinants of information retrieval strategy and the potential impacts on medical residents' information preparation performance. A two-step research approach was adopted, consisting of semistructured interviews with 21 medical residents and a simulation-based experiment with 32 medical residents. The semistructured interviews revealed that a substantial portion of medical residents (38%) relied largely on memory for preparing handover information. The simulation-based experiment showed that higher information access cost reduced information access attempts and access duration on patient documents and harmed information preparation performance. Higher accountability led to marginally longer access to patient documents. It is important to understand the underlying determinants of medical residents' information retrieval strategy and performance during prehandover preparation. We noted the criticality of easy access to patient documents in prehandover preparation. In addition, accountability marginally influenced medical residents' information retrieval strategy. Findings from this research suggested that the cost of accessing information sources should be minimized in developing handover preparation tools.

Exploiting salient semantic analysis for information retrieval

ABSTRACTRecently, many Wikipedia-based methods have been proposed to improve the performance of different natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as semantic relatedness computation, text classification and information retrieval. Among these methods, salient semantic analysis (SSA) has been proven to be an effective way to generate conceptual representation for words or documents. However, its feasibility and effectiveness in information retrieval is mostly unknown. In this paper, we study how to efficiently use SSA to improve the information retrieval performance, and propose a SSA-based retrieval method under the language model framework. First, SSA model is adopted to build conceptual representations for documents and queries. Then, these conceptual representations and the bag-of-words (BOW) representations can be used in combination to estimate the language models of queries and documents. The proposed method is evaluated on several standard text retrieval conference (TREC) collections. Experiment results on standard TREC collections show the proposed models consistently outperform the existing Wikipedia-based retrieval methods.

Enhanced Arabic Document Retrieval Using Optimized Query Paraphrasing

Query paraphrasing aims to construct a better formulation of user queries in order to enhance retrieval. Formulating search queries remains complicated for a subset of Web users. In a typical situation, a user will not receive satisfactory results from the submitted search query and will subsequently attempt different query paraphrases. The Arabic vocabulary is rich in synonyms and hyponyms. Such richness of synonyms makes automation of the paraphrasing technique crucial for Arabic information retrieval systems in order to facilitate the process of paraphrasing synonyms. In this article, we propose an enhancement for Arabic information retrieval using a query paraphrasing technique. Furthermore, two query paraphrasing optimization techniques are proposed to overcome the time complexity and exhaustive calculation of existing query paraphrasing techniques. One of these techniques uses a genetic algorithm (GA–QP), and the other employs the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC–QP). The performance of these two algorithms is compared. ABC–QP shows an improvement in Arabic information retrieval performance compared with the genetic algorithm query paraphrasing system.

Document-based approach to improve the accuracy of pairwise comparison in evaluating information retrieval systems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to have more accurate results in comparing performance of the paired information retrieval (IR) systems with reference to the current method, which is based on the mean effectiveness scores of the systems across a set of identified topics/queries. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the proposed approach, instead of the classic method of using a set of topic scores, the documents level scores are considered as the evaluation unit. These document scores are the defined document’s weight, which play the role of the mean average precision (MAP) score of the systems as a significance test’s statics. The experiments were conducted using the TREC 9 Web track collection. Findings – The p-values generated through the two types of significance tests, namely the Student’s t-test and Mann-Whitney show that by using the document level scores as an evaluation unit, the difference between IR systems is more significant compared with utilizing topic scores. Originality/value – Utilizing a suitable test collection is a primary prerequisite for IR systems comparative evaluation. However, in addition to reusable test collections, having an accurate statistical testing is a necessity for these evaluations. The findings of this study will assist IR researchers to evaluate their retrieval systems and algorithms more accurately.

Assessment of learning to rank methods for query expansion

Pseudo relevance feedback, as an effective query expansion method, can significantly improve information retrieval performance. However, the method may negatively impact the retrieval performance when some irrelevant terms are used in the expanded query. Therefore, it is necessary to refine the expansion terms. Learning to rank methods have proven effective in information retrieval to solve ranking problems by ranking the most relevant documents at the top of the returned list, but few attempts have been made to employ learning to rank methods for term refinement in pseudo relevance feedback. This article proposes a novel framework to explore the feasibility of using learning to rank to optimize pseudo relevance feedback by means of reranking the candidate expansion terms. We investigate some learning approaches to choose the candidate terms and introduce some state‐of‐the‐art learning to rank methods to refine the expansion terms. In addition, we propose two term labeling strategies and examine the usefulness of various term features to optimize the framework. Experimental results with three TREC collections show that our framework can effectively improve retrieval performance.