Information Retrieval Problem Research Articles

Wikiformer: Pre-training with Structured Information of Wikipedia for Ad-Hoc Retrieval

With the development of deep learning and natural language processing techniques, pre-trained language models have been widely used to solve information retrieval (IR) problems. Benefiting from the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, these models achieve state-of-the-art performance. In previous works, plain texts in Wikipedia have been widely used in the pre-training stage. However, the rich structured information in Wikipedia, such as the titles, abstracts, hierarchical heading (multi-level title) structure, relationship between articles, references, hyperlink structures, and the writing organizations, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we devise four pre-training objectives tailored for IR tasks based on the structured knowledge of Wikipedia. Compared to existing pre-training methods, our approach can better capture the semantic knowledge in the training corpus by leveraging the human-edited structured data from Wikipedia. Experimental results on multiple IR benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our model in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings compared to existing strong retrieval baselines. Besides, experimental results in biomedical and legal domains demonstrate that our approach achieves better performance in vertical domains compared to previous models, especially in scenarios where long text similarity matching is needed. The code is available at https://github.com/oneal2000/Wikiformer.

Token-Event-Role Structure-Based Multi-Channel Document-Level Event Extraction

Document-level event extraction is a long-standing challenging information retrieval problem involving a sequence of sub-tasks: entity extraction, event type judgment, and event type-specific multi-event extraction. However, addressing the problem as multiple learning tasks leads to increased model complexity. Also, existing methods insufficiently utilize the correlation of entities crossing different events, resulting in limited event extraction performance. This article introduces a novel framework for document-level event extraction, incorporating a new data structure called token-event-role and a multi-channel argument role prediction module. The proposed data structure enables our model to uncover the primary role of tokens in multiple events, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of event relationships. By leveraging the multi-channel prediction module, we transform entity and multi-event extraction into a single task of predicting token–event pairs, thereby reducing the overall parameter size and enhancing model efficiency. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 9.5 percentage points in terms of the F 1 score, highlighting its superior performance in event extraction. Furthermore, an ablation study confirms the significant value of the proposed data structure in improving event extraction tasks, further validating its importance in enhancing the overall performance of the framework.

Deceptive Information Retrieval.

We introduce the problem of deceptive information retrieval (DIR), in which a user wishes to download a required file out of multiple independent files stored in a system of databases while deceiving the databases by making the databases' predictions on the user-required file index incorrect with high probability. Conceptually, DIR is an extension of private information retrieval (PIR). In PIR, a user downloads a required file without revealing its index to any of the databases. The metric of deception is defined as the probability of error of databases' prediction on the user-required file, minus the corresponding probability of error in PIR. The problem is defined on time-sensitive data that keep updating from time to time. In the proposed scheme, the user deceives the databases by sending real queries to download the required file at the time of the requirement and dummy queries at multiple distinct future time instances to manipulate the probabilities of sending each query for each file requirement, using which the databases' make the predictions on the user-required file index. The proposed DIR scheme is based on a capacity achieving probabilistic PIR scheme, and achieves rates lower than the PIR capacity due to the additional downloads made to deceive the databases. When the required level of deception is zero, the proposed scheme achieves the PIR capacity.

Personalized and Diversified: Ranking Search Results in an Integrated Way

Ambiguity in queries is a common problem in information retrieval. There are currently two solutions: search result personalization and diversification. The former aims to tailor results for different users based on their preferences, but the limitations are redundant results and incomplete capture of user intents. The goal of the latter is to return results that cover as many aspects related to the query as possible. It improves diversity yet loses personality and cannot return the exact results the user wants. Intuitively, such two solutions can complement each other and bring more satisfactory reranking results. In this article, we propose a novel framework, namely, PnD , to integrate personalization and diversification reasonably. We employ the degree of refinding to determine the weight of personalization dynamically. Moreover, to improve the diversity and relevance of reranked results simultaneously, we design a reset RNN structure (RRNN) with the “reset gate” to measure the influence of the newly selected document on novelty. Besides, we devise a “subtopic learning layer” to learn the virtual subtopics, which can yield fine-grained representations of queries, documents, and user profiles. Experimental results illustrate that our model can significantly outperform existing search result personalization and diversification methods.

Decoy-state quantum private query protocol with two-way communication

Quantum private query (QPQ) is a communication protocol established under the condition of mutual distrust between communication parties, which is used to solve the symmetrically private information retrieval problem in the quantum field. However, most of the existing QPQ protocols are based on the ideal light source. In practice, the multi-photon pulse generated by the transmitter will bring great security problems. We analyze the actual security of QPQ protocol in two-way communication, and find that database security and user privacy will be seriously threatened under multi-photon pulse. So we adopt the decoy state method to solve the actual security problem of QPQ protocol in view of the user side as the light source. The results show that the decoy state method is suitable for QPQ protocol of two-way communication, and can effectively defend against multi-photon pulse attacks.

Author and organization profiles in Dimensions and Lens information systems: The study of functionality

The paper demonstrates the features of author and organizational publication profiles in Dimensions and Lens information systems. In recent years, these systems have been successfully competing with many subscription-based systems. The authors discuss the advantages of these databases in terms of coverage of research content in publication profiles as compared to that of commercial bibliographic platforms, as well as the wide range of functional capabilities. As illustrated by publication profiles of two research organizations and their authors, we describe original approaches to searching bibliographic information, as well as editing bibliographic errors in databases. These features enable (a) to monitor effectively the scholarly output of research organizations and authors, and (b) to enhance visibility of research findings in the international information space. Solving information-retrieval problems and editing publication profiles of Russian organizations and authors in Dimensions and Lens prove to be similar to that of commercial systems, i. e. Web of Science and Scopus. The vast experience of working with proprietary databases and subscription-based systems, would enable Russian academic libraries to adapt to new interfaces in a short time frame.

Syntactic-Informed Graph Networks for Sentence Matching

Matching two natural language sentences is a fundamental problem in both natural language processing and information retrieval. Preliminary studies have shown that the syntactic structures help improve the matching accuracy, and different syntactic structures in natural language are complementary to sentence semantic understanding. Ideally, a matching model would leverage all syntactic information. Existing models, however, are only able to combine limited (usually one) types of syntactic information due to the complex and heterogeneous nature of the syntactic information. To deal with the problem, we propose a novel matching model, which formulates sentence matching as a representation learning task on a syntactic-informed heterogeneous graph. The model, referred to as SIGN (Syntactic-Informed Graph Network), first constructs a heterogeneous matching graph based on the multiple syntactic structures of two input sentences. Then the graph attention network algorithm is applied to the matching graph to learn the high-level representations of the nodes. With the help of the graph learning framework, the multiple syntactic structures, as well as the word semantics, can be represented and interacted in the matching graph and therefore collectively enhance the matching accuracy. We conducted comprehensive experiments on three public datasets. The results demonstrate that SIGN outperforms the state of the art and also can discriminate the sentences in an interpretable way.

Dynamic Hybrid Fragmentation Method for Multimedia Databases

Multimedia databases store high-volume data, which causes problems in efficient information retrieval, and increases execution costs and response times of the queries. To solve this problem, data fragmentation techniques exist to improve query performance, increase information availability, and efficiently execute more operations accessing less irrelevant data. This article presents a comprehensive review of 34 methods related to hybrid fragmentation and subsequently proposes the design of a hybrid fragmentation method that adapts the scheme according to workload changes to maintain efficient retrieval of multimedia data. The proposed technologies are Java as a programming language, Java Server Faces (JSF) as a framework, MySQL and MongoDB database management systems, and NetBeans as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), following the UWE methodology (Unified Modeling Language-based Web Engineering).

Multi-User PIR with Cyclic Wraparound Multi-Access Caches.

We consider the problem of multi-access cache-aided multi-user Private Information Retrieval (MACAMuPIR) with cyclic wraparound cache access. In MACAMuPIR, several files are replicated across multiple servers. There are multiple users and multiple cache nodes. When the network is not congested, servers fill these cache nodes with the content of the files. During peak network traffic, each user accesses several cache nodes. Every user wants to retrieve one file from the servers but does not want the servers to know their demands. This paper proposes a private retrieval scheme for MACAMuPIR and characterizes the transmission cost for multi-access systems with cyclic wraparound cache access. We formalize privacy and correctness constraints and analyze transmission costs. The scheme outperforms the previously known dedicated cache setup, offering efficient and private retrieval. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-access approach. Our research contributes an efficient, privacy-preserving solution for multi-user PIR, advancing secure data retrieval from distributed servers.

Late multimodal fusion for image and audio music transcription

Music transcription, which deals with the conversion of music sources into a structured digital format, is a key problem for Music Information Retrieval (MIR). When addressing this challenge in computational terms, the MIR community follows two lines of research: music documents, which is the case of Optical Music Recognition (OMR), or audio recordings, which is the case of Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). The different nature of the aforementioned input data has conditioned these fields to develop modality-specific frameworks. However, their recent definition in terms of sequence labeling tasks leads to a common output representation, which enables research on a combined paradigm. In this respect, multimodal image and audio music transcription comprises the challenge of effectively combining the information conveyed by image and audio modalities. In this work, we explore this question at a late-fusion level: we study four combination approaches in order to merge, for the first time, the hypotheses regarding end-to-end OMR and AMT systems in a lattice-based search space. The results obtained for a series of performance scenarios–in which the corresponding single-modality models yield different error rates–showed interesting benefits of these approaches. In addition, two of the four strategies considered significantly improve the corresponding unimodal standard recognition frameworks.

Bounds on the Capacity of Private Information Retrieval Over Graphs

In the private information retrieval (PIR) problem, a user wants to retrieve a file from a database without revealing any information about the desired file’s identity to the servers that store the database. In this paper, we study the PIR capacity of a graph-based replication system, in which each file is stored on two distinct servers according to an underlying graph. This paper aims to provide upper and lower bounds to the PIR capacity of graphs via various graph properties. In particular, we provide several upper bounds on the PIR capacity that apply to all graphs. We further improve the bounds for specific graph families (which turn out to be tight in certain cases) by utilizing the underlying graph structure. For the lower bounds, we establish optimal rate PIR schemes for star graphs via edge-coloring techniques. Lastly, we provide an improved PIR scheme for complete graphs, implying an improved general lower bound on all graphs’ PIR capacity.

Bug Triage Automation Approaches

Bug triage is an essential task in the software maintenance phase. It is the process of assigning a developer (fixer) to a bug report. A personnel (triager) has to analyze the developers' profiles and bug reports for the purpose of making a suitable assignment. Manual bug triage consumes time and effort, so automating this process is a necessity. The previous research studies addressed the triage problem as an information retrieval problem, where the new bug report is the query. Other researchers tackled this problem as a classification problem and utilized traditional machine learning or deep learning techniques. A handful of research studies handled this problem as an optimization problem and utilized optimization algorithms such as Hungarian. This paper briefs and analyzes the previous bug triage approaches in addition to conducting an empirical comparison among five of the previous approaches.

Construction of Digital Management Model of Personnel Archives Information Based on the Concept of Industry 4.0.

In order to improve the effect of personnel archives information management under the background of Industry 4.0, this paper conducts in-depth research on retrieval technology. Aiming at the shortcomings and deficiencies of the existing sorting methods, this paper introduces the basic principle of information retrieval, the retrieval process, and retrieval model and proposes a relevance ranking algorithm based on the user vector calculation method and the record vector calculation method. The algorithm solves the query structure sorting problem of information retrieval, optimizes the retrieval process, and improves the efficiency of information acquisition. Under the guidance of the concept of Industry 4.0, this paper constructs the digital management model of personnel archives information. The experimental results show that the digital management model of personnel archives proposed in this paper has certain effects.

Symmetric Private Information Retrieval at the Private Information Retrieval Rate

We consider the problem of symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) with user-side common randomness. In SPIR, a user retrieves a message out of K messages from N non-colluding and replicated databases in such a way that no single database knows the retrieved message index (user privacy), and the user gets to know nothing further than the retrieved message (database privacy), i.e., the privacy constraint between the user and the databases is symmetric. SPIR has the following three properties: its capacity is smaller than the capacity of PIR which requires only user privacy; it is infeasible in the case of a single database; and it requires presence of shared common randomness among the databases. We introduce a new variant of SPIR where the user is provided with a random subset of the shared database common randomness, which is unknown to the databases. We determine the exact capacity region of the triple (d,ρS,ρU), where d is the download cost, ρS is the amount of shared database (server) common randomness, and ρU is the amount of available user-side common randomness. We show that with a suitable amount of ρU, this new SPIR achieves the capacity of the conventional PIR. As a corollary, single-database SPIR becomes feasible. Further, the presence of user-side ρU reduces the amount of required server-side ρS.

Software requirement specific entity extraction using transformer models

Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) documents provide the description of requirements and expectations attributed to software products. The structured text present in the SRS documents serves as a guide for developers in defining various functions in the process of software development. Software specific entity extraction is an important pre-processing step for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in the requirement engineering domain such as entity-centric search systems, SRS document summmarization, requirement classification, and requirement quality management. Recent advances in transformer-based models have significantly contributed to NLP and information retrieval problems, and achieved state-of-the-art performance for domain specific entity extraction tasks. In this study, we employ the transformer models including BERT, RoBERTa and ALBERT for software specific entity extraction. For this purpose, we annotate three requirement datasets, namely, DOORS, SRE, and RQA with varied sets of software specific entities. Our numerical study shows that transformer models are able to outperform the traditional approaches such as ML-CRF, and we find that BERT variants improve the F1-scores by 4% and 5% on the DOORS and SRE datasets, respectively. We conduct entity level error analysis to examine the partial and exact matching of entities and respective boundaries. Lastly, we experiment with few-shot learning to create sample efficient NER systems with template-based BART model

Learning to transfer knowledge from RDF Graphs with gated recurrent units

The Internet is a vital part of today’s ecosystem. The speedy evolution of the Internet has brought up practical issues such as the problem of information retrieval. Several methods have been proposed to solve this issue. Such approaches retrieve the information by using SPARQL queries over the Resource Description Framework (RDF) content which requires a precise match concerning the query structure and the RDF content. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based neural learning method that helps to search RDF graphs to provide probabilistic reasoning between the queries and their results. The problem is formulated as a classification task where RDF graphs are preprocessed to abstract the N-Triples, then encode the abstracted N-triples into a transitional state that is suitable for neural transfer learning. Next, we fine-tune the neural learner to learn the semantic relationships between the N-triples. To validate the proposed approach, we employ ten-fold cross-validation. The results have shown that the anticipated approach is accurate by acquiring the average accuracy, recall, precision, and f-measure. The achieved scores are 97.52%, 96.31%, 98.45%, and 97.37%, respectively, and outperforms the baseline approaches.

A design approach for a distributed system to handle Chinese

In designing systems to handle non-Roman alphabet languages, unique problems in information retrieval are encountered. The concept of "P-trees” will be explained and compared to B-trees. Experiences in applying P-trees to non-Roman alphabet retrieval environments will be covered in detail.

Intermittent Private Information Retrieval With Application to Location Privacy

We study the problem of intermittent private information retrieval with multiple servers, in which a user consecutively requests one of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> messages from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> replicated databases such that part of requests need to be protected while others do not need privacy. Motivated by the location privacy application, the correlation between requests is modeled by a Markov chain. We propose an intermittent private information retrieval scheme that concatenates an obfuscation scheme and a private information retrieval scheme for the time period when privacy is not needed, to prevent leakage incurred by the correlation over time. In the end, we illustrate how the proposed scheme for the problem of intermittent private information retrieval with Markov structure correlation can be applied to design a location privacy protection mechanism in the location privacy problem.

A Fine-Tuned BERT-Based Transfer Learning Approach for Text Classification.

Text Classification problem has been thoroughly studied in information retrieval problems and data mining tasks. It is beneficial in multiple tasks including medical diagnose health and care department, targeted marketing, entertainment industry, and group filtering processes. A recent innovation in both data mining and natural language processing gained the attention of researchers from all over the world to develop automated systems for text classification. NLP allows categorizing documents containing different texts. A huge amount of data is generated on social media sites through social media users. Three datasets have been used for experimental purposes including the COVID-19 fake news dataset, COVID-19 English tweet dataset, and extremist-non-extremist dataset which contain news blogs, posts, and tweets related to coronavirus and hate speech. Transfer learning approaches do not experiment on COVID-19 fake news and extremist-non-extremist datasets. Therefore, the proposed work applied transfer learning classification models on both these datasets to check the performance of transfer learning models. Models are trained and evaluated on the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Heat maps are also generated for every model. In the end, future directions are proposed.

The Capacity of Symmetric Private Information Retrieval Under Arbitrary Collusion and Eavesdropping Patterns

We study the symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) problem under arbitrary collusion and eavesdropping patterns for replicated databases. We find its capacity, which is the same as the capacity of the original SPIR problem with the number of servers <i>N</i> replaced by a number <i>F</i>*. The number <i>F</i>* is the optimal solution to a linear programming problem, and it is a function of the joint pattern, which is the union of the collusion and eavesdropping pattern. This is the first result that shows how two arbitrary patterns collectively affect the capacity of the SPIR problem. We draw the conclusion that for SPIR problems, the collusion and eavesdropping constraints are interchangeable in terms of capacity, i.e., the two patterns play the same role in the SPIR problem and the capacity remains unchanged if we exchange the colluding and eavesdropping patterns. As corollaries of our result, the capacity of the SPIR problem under arbitrary collusion patterns, and the capacity of the PIR problem where each colluding set is included in some eavesdropping set, are also found. Some extensions with restrictions to finite message lengths are provided, and in this case, upper and lower bounds on the capacity are given. The lower bound is described with a solution to an integer linear programming problem.