Proximity Search Research Articles

Wright American Fiction 1851–1875

In a book note on Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction, 1851–1875: A Contribution toward a Bibliography in March 1958, an editor for the Mississippi Valley Historical Review suggested that those entries in Wright's bibliography that were accompanied by short descriptive notes would prove “of particular value to historians,” citing as examples the notes “‘Anti-Catholic,’ or ‘A temperance tale,’ or ‘Ridicules Lincoln's Civil War policies’” (p. 766). Four and a half decades later, a historian can now search for particular words or phrases in the full texts of nearly three thousand titles listed in Wright's bibliography on the Wright American Fiction 1851–1875 Web site. A scholar can instantly locate passages from 11 individual works that used the exact term “anti-catholic.” A search for “temperance” returns, not surprisingly, over 700 results (searching for titles containing the term “temperance” returns 5 works). Using the site's proximity search feature, “Lincoln” can be found within 120 characters of “Civil War” in 6 works.

Pivot selection techniques for proximity searching in metric spaces

With few exceptions, proximity search algorithms in metric spaces based on the use of pivots select them at random among the objects of the metric space. However, it is well known that the way in which the pivots are selected can drastically affect the performance of the algorithm. Between two sets of pivots of the same size, better chosen pivots can largely reduce the search time. Alternatively, a better chosen small set of pivots (requiring much less space) can yield the same efficiency as a larger, randomly chosen, set. We propose an efficiency measure to compare two pivot sets, combined with an optimization technique that allows us to select good sets of pivots. We obtain abundant empirical evidence showing that our technique is effective, and it is the first that we are aware of in producing consistently good results in a wide variety of cases and in being based on a formal theory. We show that good pivots are outliers, but that selecting outliers does not ensure that good pivots are selected.

Probabilistic proximity search: Fighting the curse of dimensionality in metric spaces

Proximity searches become very difficult on “high dimensional” metric spaces, that is, those whose histogram of distances has a large mean and/or a small variance. This so-called “curse of dimensionality”, well known in vector spaces, is also observed in metric spaces. The search complexity grows sharply with the dimension and with the search radius. We present a general probabilistic framework applicable to any search algorithm and whose net effect is to reduce the search radius. The higher the dimension, the more effective the technique. We illustrate empirically its practical performance on a particular class of algorithms, where large improvements in the search time are obtained at the cost of a very small error probability.

Understanding Query Formation in the Use of Internet Search Engines

Internet search engine use is notoriously challenging and frustrating to typical users. Most users are inefficient at finding what they are looking for and often give up before achieving their goals. Most commercial search engines have advanced search interfaces that are designed to facilitate increased precision and recall, but users generally avoid these due to poor usability and high perceived difficulty of use. This paper outlines three studies that investigated the strategies and effectiveness of user-generated search queries. Scenarios were formulated to encourage users to construct the single best query for each task. In general, users were unable to construct accurate queries for tasks that required compound logic. Study 1 verified the reluctance of users to use advanced search features. Study 2 investigated the use of Boolean and proximity search commands and capitalization strategies. Participants generally did not use them properly. Study 3 compared the use of basic search with advanced search when users were forced to use each one. Performance was similar but preference measures showed a significant advantage for basic search while confidence was higher for advanced search.

Proximity Search with a Triangulated Spatial Model

The proximity relations inherent in triangulations of geometric data can be exploited in the implementation of nearest-neighbour search procedures. This is relevant to applications such as terrain analysis, cartography and robotics, in which triangulations may be used to model the spatial data. Here we describe neighbourhood search procedures within constrained Delaunay triangulations of the vertices of linear objects, for the queries of nearest object to an object and the nearest object to an arbitrary point. The procedures search locally from object edges, or from a query point, to build triangulated regions that extend from the source edge or point by a distance at least equal to that to its nearest neighbouring feature. Several geographical datasets have been used to evaluate the procedures experimentally. Average numbers of edge‐edge distance calculations to find the nearest line feature edge disjoint to another line feature edge ranged between 15 and 39 for the different datasets examined, while the average numbers of point‐edge distance calculations to determine the nearest edge to an arbitrary point ranged between 7 and 35.

Voronoi Projection-Based Fast Nearest-Neighbor Search Algorithms: Box-Search and Mapping Table-Based Search Techniques

In this paper we consider fast nearest-neighbor search techniques based on the projections of Voronoi regions. The Voronoi diagram of a given set of points provides an implicit geometric interpretation of nearest-neighbor search and serves as an important basis for several proximity search algorithms in computational geometry and in developing structure-based fast vector quantization techniques. The Voronoi projections provide an approximate characterization of the Voronoi regions with respect to their locus property of localizing the search to a small subset of codevectors. This can be viewed as a simplified and practically viable equivalent of point location using the Voronoi diagram while circumventing the complexity of the full Voronoi diagram. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of two fast search techniques using the Voronoi projections, namely, the box-search and mapping table-based search in the context of vector quantization encoding. We also propose and study the effect and advantage of using the principal component axes for data with high degree of correlation across their components, in reducing the complexity of the search based on Voronoi projections.

Some aspects of proximity searching in text retrieval systems

Describes and evaluates the proximity search facili ties in external online systems and in-house retrieval software Discusses and illustrates capabilities, syntax and circum stances ot use. Presents measurements of the overheads re quired by proximity for storage, record import time and search time The search strategy narrowing effect of proximity is illustrated by Recall and Precision test results. Usage and problems lead to a number ot design ideas for better imple mentation. some based on existing Boolean strategies. one on the use of weighted proximity to automatically produce ranked output A comparison of Boolean, quorum and proximate term pairs distance is included

The Second Reformation in Brandenburg: Aims and Goals

James L. Harner (ed.), The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM, 1983-1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998 £390, ISBN: 052162536XAmongst the premier British academic presses, Cambridge University Press has been the most innovative in exploring the possibilities of electronic publication, and The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM is an important addition to their list. This database, taken from the comprehensive annual bibliography published in Shakespeare Quarterly, cries out for electronic treatment, as anyone who has laboriously tracked through those volumes knows. The present release contains the bibliography for thirteen years, and future releases will extend the coverage to create a conspectus of the century's entire work on Shakespeare. Since this CD contains over 38,000 entries - many with further references embedded in them - the eventual size of the archive will be little short of astonishing.The data is accessed by powerful 'DynaText' software, which allows a range of search possibilities. One can undertake simple searches of the whole database, or more limited searches centred on author, title or keyword, or proximity searches of multiple terms. Navigation is aided by a contents table which indicates the user's present situation in the archive. Users can customise the database by creating their own links and adding bookmarks or annotation. The only technical difficulty I encountered is that hits on individual words are displayed at the top of the text window, making it frequently necessary to scroll back to read the whole entry. In future releases, CUP ought to revise the software to display each hit in its full context. It's also slightly annoying that essays in collections are linked to the volumes in which they appear but that the links don't work in reverse, so if you want to know the full contents you have to search on the name of the volume or editor. And you have to be wary about American/British inconsistencies: for Love's Labour's Lost you must search under both 'labour' and 'labor'.The database's usefulness can easily be exemplified. A standard on 'Hamlet' throws up 9635 hits. A proximity search of 'Hamlet' and 'source' 62. You can use searches to measure the ups and downs of critical fashion. 'Cultural materialism' occurs 246 times, but is easily outflanked by 'historicism' at 348 occurrences (though you can't look for 'New Historicism' since 'new' is a 'stop word', occurring too frequently to be searchable). …