Query Expansion Strategy Research Articles

An efficient long-text semantic retrieval approach via utilizing presentation learning on short-text

Although the short-text retrieval model by BERT achieves significant performance improvement, research on the efficiency and performance of long-text retrieval still faces challenges. Therefore, this study proposes an efficient long-text retrieval model based on BERT (called LTR-BERT). This model achieves speed improvement while retaining most of the long-text retrieval performance. In particular, The LTR-BERT model is trained by using the relevance between short texts. Then, the long text is segmented and stored off-line. In the retrieval stage, only the coding of the query and the matching scores are calculated, which speeds up the retrieval. Moreover, a query expansion strategy is designed to enhance the representation of the original query and reserve the encoding region for the query. It is beneficial for learning missing information in the representation stage. The interaction mechanism without training parameters takes into account the local semantic details and the whole relevance to ensure the accuracy of retrieval and further shorten the response time. Experiments are carried out on MS MARCO Document Ranking dataset, which is specially designed for long-text retrieval. Compared with the interaction-focused semantic matching method by BERT-CLS, the MRR@10 values of the proposed LTR-BERT method are increased by 2.74%. Moreover, the number of documents processed per millisecond increased by 333 times.

MKBQA: Question Answering over Knowledge Graph Based on Semantic Analysis and Priority Marking Method

In the field of question answering-based knowledge graphs, due to the complexity of the construction of knowledge graphs, a domain-specific knowledge graph often cannot contain some common-sense knowledge, which makes it impossible to answer questions that involve common-sense and domain knowledge at the same time. Therefore, this study proposes a knowledge graph-based question answering method in the computer science domain, which facilitates obtaining complete answers in this domain. In order to solve the problem of natural language problems being difficult to match with structured knowledge, a series of logic rules are first designed to convert natural language into triples of the question. Then, a semantic query expansion strategy based on WordNet is proposed and a priority marking algorithm is proposed to mark the order of triples of the question. Finally, when a question triple corresponds to multiple triples in the knowledge graph, it can be solved by the proposed SimCSE-based similarity method. The designed logic rules can deal with each type of question in a targeted manner according to the different question words and can effectively transform the question text into question triples. In addition, the proposed priority marking algorithm can effectively mark the order in the triple of the question. MKBQA can answer not only computer science-related questions but also extended open domain questions. In practical applications, answering a domain question often cannot rely solely on one knowledge graph. It is necessary to combine domain knowledge and common-sense knowledge. The MKBQA method provides a new idea and can be easily migrated from the field of computer science to other fields. Experiment results on real-world data sets show that, as compared to baselines, our method achieves significant improvements to question answering and can combine common-sense and domain-specific knowledge graphs to give a more complete answer.

An automation query expansion strategy for information retrieval by using fuzzy based grasshopper optimization algorithm on medical datasets

SummaryDue to the technical words employed, which are primarily recognized by medical specialists, information retrieval in the medical area is sometimes described as sophisticated. Because of this, users frequently have trouble coming up with queries utilizing these medical phrases. However, this problem may be readily fixed by an information retrieval system that finds the pertinent terms that fit the user's query and automatically creates a ranking document using these keywords. To enhance the IR performance, the Automatic Query expansion method is applied by appending additional query terms for the medical domain. We propose a novel fuzzy‐based Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA) based on automatic query expansion. This work is mainly focused on filtering the most relevant augmented query by utilizing the synchronization score of IR evidence like normalized term frequency, inverse document frequency, and normalization of document length. The main aim of this work is to identify the medical terms that appropriately match the user's queries. The GOA algorithm ranks the terms based on relevance and then identifies the terms with the maximum synchronization value. The documents formed using the optimal expanded query are classified into three types, namely totally relevant, moderately relevant, and marginally relevant. Besides, the comparison of the proposed work is carried out for different performance metrics like Mean‐Average Precision, F‐measure, Precision‐recall, and Precision rank are evaluated and analyzed by using TREC‐COVID, TREC Genomics 2007, and MEDLARs medical datasets for the proposed and some of the state‐of‐art works. For a total of 60 queries, the proposed model offers an F1‐Score of 0.964, 0.959, and 0.968 for the MEDLARS, TREC Genomics, and TREC COVID19 datasets, respectively. The E1‐score and Mean Reciprocal Rate (MRR) of the proposed model is 0.8 and 0.9 when evaluated using the TREC COVID19 dataset. Performance analyses show that the proposed approach outperforms the other automatic keyword expansion approaches in the medical domain.

Hybrid optimized query expansion strategy for semantic information retrieval using spatial bound whale and binary moth flame optimization algorithm

SummaryThe standard information retrieval systems mainly extract documents based on the relative keywords and this method is not effective since the related information can be only identified by extracting the semantics present in the text. Hence to overcome this problem, a semantic‐based query retrieval model is formulated in this article for query processing, identification, extraction, expansion, sorting, and filtering. A keyword expansion approach using the hybrid spatial bound whale optimization algorithm‐binary moth flame optimization algorithm is proposed in this work. In this way, the complexity associated with insufficient query information is overcome. The efficiency of the proposed model in extracting the top k relevant information is evaluated using the experiments conducted in the TREC data using different performance metrics such as precision@k, recall@k, mean reciprocal rank@k, mean average precision, and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG@k). The proposed model achieves improved outcomes when compared to different state‐of‐art techniques such as i‐Dataquest, fuzzy logic, ontological framework for information extraction, and personal knowledge management in terms of precision@k, recall@k, mean reciprocal rank@k, exact match, F1‐score, and NDCG@k. The proposed model gives a mean reciprocal rank@k score of 0.8901, 0.8947, 0.8958, and 0.9014 for the k‐values 1, 3, 5, and 10, respectively. The MAP@k score for the top‐10 result suggestion retrieved is 0.39056. The exact match score of the proposed model for the newsgroup, SQuAD 1.0, and SQUAD 2.0 is 93.25, 94.65, and 95.25.

Word-embedding-based query expansion: Incorporating Deep Averaging Networks in Arabic document retrieval

One of the main issues associated with search engines is the query–document vocabulary mismatch problem, a long-standing problem in Information Retrieval (IR). This problem occurs when a user query does not match the content of stored documents, and it affects most search tasks. Automatic query expansion (AQE) is one of the most common approaches used to address this problem. Various AQE techniques have been proposed; these mainly involve finding synonyms or related words for the query terms. Word embedding (WE) is one of the methods that are currently receiving significant attention. Most of the existing AQE techniques focus on expanding the individual query terms rather the entire query during the expansion process, and this can lead to query drift if poor expansion terms are selected. In this article, we introduce Deep Averaging Networks (DANs), an architecture that feeds the average of the WE vectors produced by the Word2Vec toolkit for the terms in a query through several linear neural network layers. This average vector is assumed to represent the meaning of the query as a whole and can be used to find expansion terms that are relevant to the complete query. We explore the potential of DANs for AQE in Arabic document retrieval. We experiment with using DANs for AQE in the classic probabilistic BM25 model as well as for two recent expansion strategies: Embedding-Based Query Expansion approach (EQE1) and Prospect-Guided Query Expansion Strategy (V2Q). Although DANs did not improve all outcomes when used in the BM25 model, it outperformed all baselines when incorporated into the EQE1 and V2Q expansion strategies.

Document Retrieval for Precision Medicine Using a Deep Learning Ensemble Method.

BackgroundWith the development of biomedicine, the number of biomedical documents has increased rapidly bringing a great challenge for researchers trying to retrieve the information they need. Information retrieval aims to meet this challenge by searching relevant documents from abundant documents based on the given query. However, sometimes the relevance of search results needs to be evaluated from multiple aspects in specific retrieval tasks, thereby increasing the difficulty of biomedical information retrieval.ObjectiveThis study aimed to find a more systematic method for retrieving relevant scientific literature for a given patient.MethodsIn the initial retrieval stage, we supplemented query terms through query expansion strategies and applied query boosting to obtain an initial ranking list of relevant documents. In the re-ranking phase, we employed a text classification model and relevance matching model to evaluate documents from different dimensions and then combined the outputs through logistic regression to re-rank all the documents from the initial ranking list.ResultsThe proposed ensemble method contributed to the improvement of biomedical retrieval performance. Compared with the existing deep learning–based methods, experimental results showed that our method achieved state-of-the-art performance on the data collection provided by the Text Retrieval Conference 2019 Precision Medicine Track.ConclusionsIn this paper, we proposed a novel ensemble method based on deep learning. As shown in the experiments, the strategies we used in the initial retrieval phase such as query expansion and query boosting are effective. The application of the text classification model and relevance matching model better captured semantic context information and improved retrieval performance.

FactQA: question answering over domain knowledge graph based on two-level query expansion

PurposeWith the advent of the era of Big Data, the scale of knowledge graph (KG) in various domains is growing rapidly, which holds huge amount of knowledge surely benefiting the question answering (QA) research. However, the KG, which is always constituted of entities and relations, is structurally inconsistent with the natural language query. Thus, the QA system based on KG is still faced with difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to answer the domain-specific questions based on KG, providing conveniences for the information query over domain KG.Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a method FactQA to answer the factual questions about specific domain. A series of logical rules are designed to transform the factual questions into the triples, in order to solve the structural inconsistency between the user’s question and the domain knowledge. Then, the query expansion strategies and filtering strategies are proposed from two levels (i.e. words and triples in the question). For matching the question with domain knowledge, not only the similarity values between the words in the question and the resources in the domain knowledge but also the tag information of these words is considered. And the tag information is obtained by parsing the question using Stanford CoreNLP. In this paper, the KG in metallic materials domain is used to illustrate the FactQA method.FindingsThe designed logical rules have time stability for transforming the factual questions into the triples. Additionally, after filtering the synonym expansion results of the words in the question, the expansion quality of the triple representation of the question is improved. The tag information of the words in the question is considered in the process of data matching, which could help to filter out the wrong matches.Originality/valueAlthough the FactQA is proposed for domain-specific QA, it can also be applied to any other domain besides metallic materials domain. For a question that cannot be answered, FactQA would generate a new related question to answer, providing as much as possible the user with the information they probably need. The FactQA could facilitate the user’s information query based on the emerging KG.

MOSSA: a morpho-semantic knowledge extraction system for Arabic information retrieval

In this paper, we propose to exploit different morpho-semantic resources to enhance Arabic information retrieval (IR). We use standardised LMF Arabic dictionaries and Arabic corpora. Our goal by this communication is to take advantage of the different existing resources to extract useful knowledge for Arabic IR. We equally study the impact of the Arabic morphology on IR effectiveness. Several query expansion strategies are carried based on morphological, semantic and morpho-semantic relations. In addition, combining such knowledge is also studied and evaluated. We experiment the effect of short diacritics and part of speech (POS) disambiguation and tagging in the indexing step. A graph-based representation is used to formalise knowledge resources graph-based representation. This latter represents a powerful formalism to express semantics of texts and to support NLP tools and applications as IR. Several experimental comparisons are handled between the different used knowledge resources and the different carried IR approaches.

MOSSA: a morpho-semantic knowledge extraction system for Arabic information retrieval

In this paper, we propose to exploit different morpho-semantic resources to enhance Arabic information retrieval (IR). We use standardised LMF Arabic dictionaries and Arabic corpora. Our goal by this communication is to take advantage of the different existing resources to extract useful knowledge for Arabic IR. We equally study the impact of the Arabic morphology on IR effectiveness. Several query expansion strategies are carried based on morphological, semantic and morpho-semantic relations. In addition, combining such knowledge is also studied and evaluated. We experiment the effect of short diacritics and part of speech (POS) disambiguation and tagging in the indexing step. A graph-based representation is used to formalise knowledge resources graph-based representation. This latter represents a powerful formalism to express semantics of texts and to support NLP tools and applications as IR. Several experimental comparisons are handled between the different used knowledge resources and the different carried IR approaches.

Multi-field query expansion is effective for biomedical dataset retrieval.

In the context of the bioCADDIE challenge addressing information retrieval of biomedical datasets, we propose a method for retrieval of biomedical data sets with heterogenous schemas through query reformulation. In particular, the method proposed transforms the initial query into a multi-field query that is then enriched with terms that are likely to occur in the relevant datasets. We compare and evaluate two query expansion strategies, one based on the Rocchio method and another based on a biomedical lexicon. We then perform a comprehensive comparative evaluation of our method on the bioCADDIE dataset collection for biomedical retrieval. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our multi-field query method compared to two baselines, with MAP improved from 0.2171 and 0.2669 to 0.2996. We also show the benefits of query expansion, where the Rocchio expanstion method improves the MAP for our two baselines from 0.2171 and 0.2669 to 0.335. We show that the Rocchio query expansion method slightly outperforms the one based on the biomedical lexicon as a source of terms, with an improvement of roughly 3% for MAP. However, the query expansion method based on the biomedical lexicon is much less resource intensive since it does not require computation of any relevance feedback set or any initial execution of the query. Hence, in term of trade-off between efficiency, execution time and retrieval accuracy, we argue that the query expansion method based on the biomedical lexicon offers the best performance for a prototype biomedical data search engine intended to be used at a large scale. In the official bioCADDIE challenge results, although our approach is ranked seventh in terms of the infNDCG evaluation metric, it ranks second in term of P@10 and NDCG. Hence, the method proposed here provides overall good retrieval performance in relation to the approaches of other competitors. Consequently, the observations made in this paper should benefit the development of a Data Discovery Index prototype or the improvement of the existing one.

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.

A multimodal query expansion based on genetic programming for visually-oriented e-commerce applications

We present a novel multimodal query expansion strategy, based on genetic programming (GP), for image search in visually-oriented e-commerce applications. Our GP-based approach aims at both: learning to expand queries with multimodal information and learning to compute the “best” ranking for the expanded queries. However, different from previous work, the query is only expressed in terms of the visual content, which brings several challenges for this type of application. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we have collected two datasets containing images of clothing products taken from different online shops. Experimental results indicate that our method is an effective alternative for improving the quality of image search results when compared to a genetic programming system based only on visual information. Our method can achieve gains varying from 10.8% against the strongest learning-to-rank baseline to 54% against an adhoc specialized solution for the particular domain at hand.

Query-Adaptive Small Object Search Using Object Proposals and Shape-Aware Descriptors

While there has been a significant amount of work on object search and image retrieval, the focus has primarily been on establishing effective models for the whole images, scenes, and objects occupying a large portion of an image. In this paper, we propose to leverage object proposals to identify small and smooth-structured objects in a large image database. Unlike popular methods exploring a coarse image-level pairwise similarity, the search is designed to exploit the similarity measures at the proposal level. An effective graph-based query expansion strategy is designed to assess each of these better matched proposals against all its neighbors within the same image for a precise localization. Combined with a shape-aware feature descriptor EdgeBoW, a set of more insightful edge-weights and node-utility measures, the proposed search strategy can handle varying view angles, illumination conditions, deformation, and occlusion efficiently. Experiments performed on a number of other benchmark datasets show the powerful and superior generalization ability of this single integrated framework in dealing with both clutter-intensive real-life images and poor-quality binary document images at equal dexterity.

Health consumer-oriented information retrieval.

While patients can freely access their Electronic Health Records or online health information, they may not be able to correctly understand the content of these documents. One of the challenges is related to the difference between expert and non-expert languages. We propose to investigate this issue within the Information Retrieval field. The patient queries have to be associated with the corresponding expert documents, that provide trustworthy information. Our approach relies on a state-of-the-art IR system called Indri and on semantic resources. Different query expansion strategies are explored. Our system shows up to 0.6740 P@10, up to 0.7610 R@10, and up to 0.6793 NDCG@10.

The Use of Arabic WordNet in Arabic Information Retrieval

Research and experimentation using Arabic WordNet in the field of information retrieval are relatively new. It is limited compared to the research that has been done using Princeton WordNet. This work attempts to study the impact of Arabic WordNet on the performance of Arabic information retrieval. We extend Lucene with Arabic WordNet to expand user's queries. The major contribution of this study is to propose an interactive query expansion (IQE) methodology using the word's part-of-speech, according to the part it plays in a query. First, the user selects the appropriate part of speech for each term in the original query, and then he reselects the appropriate synonyms. Experimental results show that our IQE strategy produces a good Mean Average Precision (MAP), it is able to improve MAP by 12.6%, but no variant of automatic query expansion (AQE) strategies did. Nevertheless, the experiments allow us to conclude that with an appropriate use of Arabic WordNet as a source of linguistic information for AQE can improve effectiveness for Arabic information retrieval.

Exploiting entity relationship for query expansion in enterprise search

Enterprise search is important, and the search quality has a direct impact on the productivity of an enterprise. Enterprise data contain both structured and unstructured information. Since these two types of information are complementary and the structured information such as relational databases is designed based on ER (entity-relationship) models, there is a rich body of information about entities in enterprise data. As a result, many information needs of enterprise search center around entities. For example, a user may formulate a query describing a problem that she encounters with an entity, e.g., the web browser, and want to retrieve relevant documents to solve the problem. Intuitively, information related to the entities mentioned in the query, such as related entities and their relations, would be useful to reformulate the query and improve the retrieval performance. However, most existing studies on query expansion are term-centric. In this paper, we propose a novel entity-centric query expansion framework for enterprise search. Specifically, given a query containing entities, we first utilize both unstructured and structured information to find entities that are related to the ones in the query. We then discuss how to adapt existing feedback methods to use the related entities and their relations to improve search quality. Experimental results over two real-world enterprise collections show that the proposed entity-centric query expansion strategies are more effective and robust to improve the search performance than the state-of-the-art pseudo feedback methods for long natural language-like queries with entities. Moreover, results over a TREC ad hoc retrieval collections show that the proposed methods can also work well for short keyword queries in the general search domain.

Use of controlled vocabularies to improve biomedical information retrieval tasks.

The high heterogeneity of biomedical vocabulary is a major obstacle for information retrieval in large biomedical collections. Therefore, using biomedical controlled vocabularies is crucial for managing these contents. We investigate the impact of query expansion based on controlled vocabularies to improve the effectiveness of two search engines. Our strategy relies on the enrichment of users' queries with additional terms, directly derived from such vocabularies applied to infectious diseases and chemical patents. We observed that query expansion based on pathogen names resulted in improvements of the top-precision of our first search engine, while the normalization of diseases degraded the top-precision. The expansion of chemical entities, which was performed on the second search engine, positively affected the mean average precision. We have shown that query expansion of some types of biomedical entities has a great potential to improve search effectiveness; therefore a fine-tuning of query expansion strategies could help improving the performances of search engines.

A Multi-Agent Personalized Query Refinement Approach for Academic Paper Retrieval in Big Data Environment

This paper proposes a multi-agent query refinement approach to realize personalized query expansion effective for academic paper retrieval in a Big Data environment. First, we use Hadoop as a platform to develop a formalized model to represent different types of large caches of data in order to analyze and process Big Data efficiently. Second, we use a client agent to verify user identities and monitor whether a device is ready to run a query-expanded task. We then use a query expansion agent to determine the domain that the initial query belongs to by applying a knowledgebased query expansion strategy and comprehensively considering users’ interests according to the intelligent devices they use by implementing a user-device-based query expansion strategy and a weighted query expansion strategy in order to obtain the optimized query expansion set. We compare our method with the conceptual retrieval method as well as other two lexical methods for query expansion, and we prove that our method has better average recall and average precision ratios.

Special Issue on Advanced Intelligent Systems

The 12th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems (ISIS 2011) held at La Vie DfOr Resort, Suwon, Korea, on September 28 to October 1, 2011, featured presentations by researchers, engineers and practitioners on the latest accomplishments, innovations and applications in artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, and information technology. The 152 papers consisted of 110 regular papers, 39 organized session papers and 3 invited papers were contributed to the conference. The Program Committee requested ISIS 2011 reviewers to select papers for a special issue of the Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence & Intelligent Informatics (JACIII), of which about 10 were accepted for publication in a twopart ISIS 2011 special issue, Vol.16, No.7, containing 5 papers. Part II will feature about 5 papers. A brief review of Part I covers 5 papers: First paper proposes a quantitative model for assessing the collision risk in maritime waterway traffic. The method proposes recent maritime traffic characteristics in time-variant CPA waterway environments and models a dynamic causation factor as a risk indicator. Second paper proposes multiagent query refinement realizing personalized query refinement by three strategies ? knowledge-based query expansion, user-device-based query and weighted query expansion strategy. These approaches determine the domain that the initial query belongs to and expand the query by comprehensively considering user interests. Third paper presents variable-step-size incremental conductance direct maximum power point tracking using fuzzy membership for a standalone photovoltaic system under rapidly changing irradiation. Fourth paper applies a natural actor-critic (NAC) and natural evolution strategies (NES) from natural-gradient-based machine learning to path-tracking control problems for autonomous vehicles. Fifth paper presents features for authenticating painting style, specifically that of Piet Mondrain. It demonstrates meaningful features using two supervised learning algorithms ? decision tree induction algorithm C4.5 and the feature generating machine (FGM) ? selecting important features in the course of learning. We thank the reviewers for their time and effort in making this special issue available so quickly. We are also grateful to the JACIII editorial office for invaluable assistance and advice in putting the issue together.

Every document has a geographical scope

It is a useful premise to assume that every document in a collection and every query issued to an information retrieval (IR) system are geography-dependent. If one can determine what area an article is about (i.e., its geographical scope), this information can be used to improve the accuracy with which people, places and organisations named in the article can be located. More importantly, geographical scopes of documents may be exploited to improve the performance of IR systems against geography-dependent user queries by tuning relevance ranking and query expansion strategies with scope metadata. We want to answer the following pertinent questions to ascertain the usefulness of geographical information in improving retrieval accuracy: (1) how far can geographical information in queries and documents improve retrieval accuracy of IR systems when answering geography-dependent queries; and, (2) how effectively can geographical information in queries and documents be utilised to improve the quality of relevance ranking in geographical IR domain. This paper outlines strategies to determine the geographical scope of documents, and describes methods to utilise scope information to improve the performance of toponym resolution, relevance ranking and query expansion.