Traditional Information Retrieval Research Articles

ExCS: accelerating code search with code expansion

Efficiently searching and reusing code from expansive codebases is pivotal for enhancing developers’ productivity. In recent times, the emergence of deep learning-driven neural ranking models, characterized by their vast dimensions and intricate interaction mechanisms, has been noteworthy. Yet, these models, in real-world scenarios, pose computational challenges due to their high dimensionality. Moreover, models rooted in interaction necessitate querying every piece of code within a voluminous corpus. While these methodologies offer superior accuracy, their online retrieval process is considerably more time-consuming compared to traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Addressing this, we introduce “ExCS”, an innovative code search tool designed to expedite the code search process without compromising on accuracy. ExCS innovatively employs code expansion in its offline phase, leveraging predictions on potential queries for specific codes, thereby enriching the code’s semantic depth. During online retrieval, ExCS prioritizes IR-based methods to pinpoint a concise set of persuasive candidates. Our evaluations, conducted on the Java dataset from CodeSearchNet, reveal that ExCS achieves a remarkable 90% reduction in retrieval duration while maintaining an impressive 99% retrieval accuracy.

Retrieve–Revise–Refine: A novel framework for retrieval of concise entailing legal article set

The retrieval of entailing legal article sets aims to identify a concise set of legal articles that holds an entailment relationship with a legal query or its negation. Unlike traditional information retrieval that focuses on relevance ranking, this task demands conciseness. However, prior research has inadequately addressed this need by employing traditional methods. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-stage Retrieve–Revise–Refine framework which explicitly addresses the need for conciseness by utilizing both small and large language models (LMs) in distinct yet complementary roles. Empirical evaluations on the COLIEE 2022 and 2023 datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances performance, achieving absolute increases in the macro F2 score by 3.17% and 4.24% over previous state-of-the-art methods, respectively. Specifically, our Retrieve stage, employing various tailored fine-tuning strategies for small LMs, achieved a recall rate exceeding 0.90 in the top-5 results alone—ensuring comprehensive coverage of entailing articles. In the subsequent Revise stage, large LMs narrow this set, improving precision while sacrificing minimal coverage. The Refine stage further enhances precision by leveraging specialized insights from small LMs, resulting in a relative improvement of up to 19.15% in the number of concise article sets retrieved compared to previous methods. Our framework offers a promising direction for further research on specialized methods for retrieving concise sets of entailing legal articles, thereby more effectively meeting the task’s demands.

A Study of Word Bigrams for Pseudo-relevance Feedback in Information Retrieval

Traditional information retrieval models mostly adopt a term independence assumption and are based on single terms or unigrams. Past efforts have attempted to go beyond this assumption, such as by using contiguous terms (i.e. word n-grams) or terms appearing in proximity. One such approach employs pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) in an extended BM25 model, with an expanded query containing bigrams and proximity word pairs besides unigrams. However, the benefit of this approach over the traditional unigram PRF remains inconclusive. We speculate the uncertain effectiveness of bigram PRF in this past work is due to: (1) The new bigrams obtained from the expanded query may be formed by pairing unigrams drawn from different documents. These are potentially noise instead of relevant concepts; (2) The collection statistics of n-grams needed to calculate the document ranking functions, such as their document frequency, is not available in retrieval. Only estimates of these quantities are used instead. We suggest that these issues may be overcome by extracting word n-grams as single units in query expansion, and employing a document index that contains both unigrams and word n-grams. We demonstrate the approach for the case of bigram PRF in an extended BM25. Retrieval experiments are conducted on a range of standard test collections. For the majority of tested collections, the difference between values of the evaluation metrics (Mean Average Precision and the precision-oriented NDCG@20) obtained by our bigram PRF and the unigram PRF baseline is not statistically significant. Thus, our bigram PRF fails to improve over unigram PRF robustly across collections. An analysis of our results reveals ‘query drift’ due to bigram query expansion terms that represent too-broad topics as a cause for the failure of our approach.

The Application of Dewey Decimal System in Traditional Libraries

The Dewey Decimal System, created by Melvil Dewey in the late 19th century, has been a linchpin of traditional library classification systems for well over a century. This abstract provides a concise overview of the historical significance, principles, and enduring relevance of the Dewey Decimal System in traditional library settings. The Dewey Decimal System revolutionized the way libraries organized their collections, simplifying the process of locating and accessing books and materials. This paper traces the historical development of the Dewey Decimal System and its profound impact on traditional library cataloging and information retrieval. Key principles, such as the use of decimal notation and hierarchical classification, are explored in detail, highlighting their pivotal role in enhancing library management efficiency. Despite its enduring utility, this abstract also acknowledges the system's limitations. Traditional libraries have faced significant challenges in adapting the Dewey Decimal System to accommodate digital resources, multimedia materials, and non - traditional formats. Furthermore, questions have arisen regarding the system's cultural biases and its ability to adequately represent the diversity of knowledge and perspectives. In today's digital age, traditional libraries confront a unique set of challenges, necessitating a reevaluation of the Dewey Decimal System's role and adaptability. This abstract underscores the ongoing dialogue surrounding the system's relevance and its capacity to meet the evolving needs of modern libraries and information seekers. In conclusion, the Dewey Decimal System remains a cornerstone of traditional library organization, albeit with notable adaptational challenges. This abstract serves as a foundation for understanding the historical and contemporary significance of the Dewey Decimal System within the context of traditional libraries, setting the stage for a more comprehensive examination of its impact and future prospects in the full paper.

FMCF: A fusing multiple code features approach based on Transformer for Solidity smart contracts source code summarization

A smart contract is a software program executed on a blockchain, designed to facilitate functionalities such as contract execution, asset administration, and identity validation within a secure and decentralized ecosystem. Summarizing the code of Solidity smart contracts aids developers in promptly grasping essential functionalities, thereby enhancing the security posture of Ethereum-based projects. Existing smart contract code summarization works mainly use traditional information retrieval and single code features, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this study, we propose a fusing multiple code features (FMCF) approach based on Transformer for Solidity summarization. First, FMCF created contract integrity modeling and state immutability modeling in the data preprocessing stage to process and filter data that meets security conditions. At the same time, FMCF retains the self-attention mechanism to construct the Graph Attention Network (GAT) encoder and CodeBERT encoder, which respectively extract multiple feature vectors of the code to ensure the integrity of the source code information. Furthermore, the FMCF uses a weighted summation method to input these two types of feature vectors into the feature fusion module for fusion and inputs the fused feature vectors into the Transformer decoder to obtain the final smart contract code summarization. The experimental results show that FMCF outperforms the standard baseline methods by 12.45% in the BLEU score and maximally preserves the semantic information and syntax structures of the source code. The results demonstrate that the FMCF can provide a good direction for future research on smart contract code summarization, thereby helping developers enhance the security of development projects.

A question-answering framework for automated abstract screening using large language models.

This paper aims to address the challenges in abstract screening within systematic reviews (SR) by leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We employ LLM to prioritize candidate studies by aligning abstracts with the selection criteria outlined in an SR protocol. Abstract screening was transformed into a novel question-answering (QA) framework, treating each selection criterion as a question addressed by LLM. The framework involves breaking down the selection criteria into multiple questions, properly prompting LLM to answer each question, scoring and re-ranking each answer, and combining the responses to make nuanced inclusion or exclusion decisions. Large-scale validation was performed on the benchmark of CLEF eHealth 2019 Task 2: Technology-Assisted Reviews in Empirical Medicine. Focusing on GPT-3.5 as a case study, the proposed QA framework consistently exhibited a clear advantage over traditional information retrieval approaches and bespoke BERT-family models that were fine-tuned for prioritizing candidate studies (ie, from the BERT to PubMedBERT) across 31 datasets of 4 categories of SRs, underscoring their high potential in facilitating abstract screening. The experiments also showcased the viability of using selection criteria as a query for reference prioritization. The experiments also showcased the viability of the framework using different LLMs. Investigation justified the indispensable value of leveraging selection criteria to improve the performance of automated abstract screening. LLMs demonstrated proficiency in prioritizing candidate studies for abstract screening using the proposed QA framework. Significant performance improvements were obtained by re-ranking answers using the semantic alignment between abstracts and selection criteria. This further highlighted the pertinence of utilizing selection criteria to enhance abstract screening.

Enhancing Medical Image Retrieval with UMLS-Integrated CNN-Based Text Indexing.

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have demonstrated notable advancements in various domains such as image classification and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite their success in image classification tasks, their potential impact on medical image retrieval, particularly in text-based medical image retrieval (TBMIR) tasks, has not yet been fully realized. This could be attributed to the complexity of the ranking process, as there is ambiguity in treating TBMIR as an image retrieval task rather than a traditional information retrieval or NLP task. To address this gap, our paper proposes a novel approach to re-ranking medical images using a Deep Matching Model (DMM) and Medical-Dependent Features (MDF). These features incorporate categorical attributes such as medical terminologies and imaging modalities. Specifically, our DMM aims to generate effective representations for query and image metadata using a personalized CNN, facilitating matching between these representations. By using MDF, a semantic similarity matrix based on Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) meta-thesaurus, and a set of personalized filters taking into account some ranking features, our deep matching model can effectively consider the TBMIR task as an image retrieval task, as previously mentioned. To evaluate our approach, we performed experiments on the medical ImageCLEF datasets from 2009 to 2012. The experimental results show that the proposed model significantly enhances image retrieval performance compared to the baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.

Next generation of electronic medical record search engines to support chart reviews: A systematic user study and future research direction

ObjectiveLittle research has been done on the user-centered document ranking approach, especially in a crowdsourcing chart review environment. As the starting point of designing and implementing the next generation of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) search engines, a systematic user study is needed to better understand the users' needs, challenges, and future research directions of EMR search engines. Materials and methodsOne primary observation during the user study is the need for a ranking method to better support the so-called "early stopping" reviewing strategy (i.e., reviewing only a subset of EMRs of one patient to make the final decision) during the clinical chart reviews. The authors proposed two novel user-centered ranking metrics: "critical documents" and "negative guarantee ratio," to better measure the power of a ranking method in supporting the “early stopping” requirements during clinical chart reviews. ResultsThe evaluation results show that i) traditional information retrieval metrics, such as the precision-at-K, have limitations in guiding the design and development of EMR search engines to better support clinical chart reviews; ii) there is not a global optimal ranking method that fits the needs of different chart reviews and different users; iii) a learning-to-rank approach cannot guarantee a stable and optimal ranking for different chart reviews and different users; and iv) A user-centered ranking metric, such as the negative guarantee ratio (NGR) metric is able to measure the “early-stopping” performance of ranking methods. ConclusionsUser-centered ranking metrics can better measure the power of ranking methods in supporting clinical chart reviews. Future research should explore more user-centered ranking metrics and evaluate their impact on real-world EMR search engines.

Towards a Regulatory Framework for Electronic Medical Record Data Visualization.

Physicians struggle to retrieve data from electronic medical records. We evaluated a digital tool that enhances physician efficiency in retrieving and analyzing patient information for treatment decision-making. Our use case is the care of diabetic patients. Evaluation results showed that healthcare providers who used the i4C (Insights for Care) dashboard experienced greater time efficiency than those who used traditional EMR information retrieval methods. A comprehensive evaluation of the i4C Dashboard confirms its effectiveness in facilitating diabetic care data management, as well as its potential application to a wide range of healthcare scenarios. In order to further maximize its effectiveness on clinical efficiency and patient care, future research should focus on improving its usability and scalability.

Application of Routing Algorithm Based on Logical Petri Nets in the Structural Design of Agricultural Products Logistics System

Abstract In agricultural services, logistics around agricultural products has been the focus of academic attention. To implement efficient and safe logistics of agricultural products and optimize logistics' overall efficiency and investment cost. This paper describes in detail the routing algorithm based on logical Petri nets, proposes a research system for agricultural product logistics based on the routing algorithm, and analyses system operation results through simulation experiments. The specific conclusions are as follows: (1) The logistics information modeling software based on logical Petri net is established, and the LPN model of the logistics information set is built based on it. (2) It is proposed that the server computer acts as a cloud service platform. The independent computer represents the traditional logistics information retrieval model, and the computational efficiency has been significantly improved. (3) The use of server computers to obtain logistics information in 300-400ms and the use of stand-alone computers to obtain logistics information in 50-120ms, the use of server computers to obtain logistics information is more efficient than using stand-alone computers. (4) Logistics data is a fast-growing trend; stand-alone computers cannot store massive data.

An Efficient Document Retrieval for Korean Open-Domain Question Answering Based on ColBERT

Open-domain question answering requires the task of retrieving documents with high relevance to the query from a large-scale corpus. Deep learning-based dense retrieval methods have become the primary approach for finding related documents. Although deep learning-based methods have improved search accuracy compared to traditional techniques, they simultaneously impose a considerable increase in computational burden. Consequently, research on efficient models and methods that optimize the trade-off between search accuracy and time to alleviate computational demands is required. In this paper, we propose a Korean document retrieval method utilizing ColBERT’s late interaction paradigm to efficiently calculate the relevance between questions and documents. For open-domain Korean question answering document retrieval, we construct a Korean dataset using various corpora from AI-Hub. We conduct experiments comparing the search accuracy and inference time among the traditional IR (information retrieval) model BM25, the dense retrieval approach utilizing BERT-based models for Korean, and our proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a higher accuracy than BM25 and requires less search time than the dense retrieval method employing KoBERT. Moreover, the most outstanding performance is observed when using KoSBERT, a pre-trained Korean language model that learned to position semantically similar sentences closely in vector space.

Content-based image retrieval based on corel dataset using deep learning

A popular technique for retrieving images from huge and unlabeled image databases are content-based-image-retrieval (CBIR). However, the traditional information retrieval techniques do not satisfy users in terms of time consumption and accuracy. Additionally, the number of images accessible to users are growing due to web development and transmission networks. As the result, huge digital image creation occurs in many places. Therefore, quick access to these huge image databases and retrieving images like a query image from these huge image collections provides significant challenges and the need for an effective technique. Feature extraction and similarity measurement are important for the performance of a CBIR technique. This work proposes a simple but efficient deep-learning framework based on convolutional-neural networks (CNN) for the feature extraction phase in CBIR. The proposed CNN aims to reduce the semantic gap between low-level and high-level features. The similarity measurements are used to compute the distance between the query and database image features. When retrieving the first 10 pictures, an experiment on the Corel-1K dataset showed that the average precision was 0.88 with Euclidean distance, which was a big step up from the state-of-the-art approaches.

Rethinking E-Commerce Search

E-commerce search and recommendation usually operate on structured data such as product catalogs and taxonomies. However, creating better search and recommendation systems often requires a large variety of unstructured data including customer reviews and articles on the web. Traditionally, the solution has always been converting unstructured data into structured data through information extraction, and conducting search over the structured data. However, this is a costly approach that often has low quality. In this paper, we envision a solution that does entirely the opposite. Instead of converting unstructured data (web pages, customer reviews, etc) to structured data, we instead convert structured data (product inventory, catalogs, taxonomies, etc) into textual data, which can be easily integrated into the text corpus that trains LLMs. Then, search and recommendation can be performed through a Q/A mechanism through an LLM instead of using traditional information retrieval methods over structured data.

Towards a Method to Enable the Selection of Physical Models within the Systems Engineering Process: A Case Study with Simulink Models

The use of different techniques and tools is a common practice to cover all stages in the development life-cycle of systems generating a significant number of work products. These artefacts are frequently encoded using diverse formats, and often require access through non-standard protocols and formats. In this context, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) emerges as a methodology to shift the paradigm of Systems Engineering practice from a document-oriented environment to a model-intensive environment. To achieve this major goal, a formalised application of modelling is employed throughout the life-cycle of systems to generate various system artefacts represented as models, such as requirements, logical models, and multi-physics models. However, the mere use of models does not guarantee one of the main challenges in the Systems Engineering discipline, namely, the reuse of system artefacts. Considering the fact that models are becoming the main type of system artefact, it is necessary to provide the capability to properly and efficiently represent and retrieve the generated models. In light of this, traditional information retrieval techniques have been widely studied to match existing software assets according to a set of capabilities or restrictions. However, there is much more at stake than the simple retrieval of models or even any piece of knowledge. An environment for model reuse must provide the proper mechanisms to (1) represent any piece of data, information, or knowledge under a common and shared data model, and (2) provide advanced retrieval mechanisms to elevate the meaning of information resources from text-based descriptions to concept-based ones. This need has led to novel methods using word embeddings and vector-based representations to semantically encode information. Such methods are applied to encode the information of physical models while preserving their underlying semantics. In this study, a text corpus from MATLAB Simulink models was preprocessed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and trained to generate word vector representations. Then, the presented method was validated using a testbed of MATLAB Simulink physical models in which verbalisations of models are transformed into vectors. The effectiveness of the proposed solution was assessed through a use case study. Evaluation of the results demonstrates a precision value of 0.925, a recall value of 0.865, and an F1 score of 0.884.

Enhancing Multimodal Information Retrieval Through Integrating Data Mining and Deep Learning Techniques

Multimodal information retrieval, the task of re trieving relevant information from heterogeneous data sources such as text, images, and videos, has gained significant attention in recent years due to the proliferation of multimedia content on the internet. This paper proposes an approach to enhance multimodal information retrieval by integrating data mining and deep learning techniques. Traditional information retrieval systems often struggle to effectively handle multimodal data due to the inherent complexity and diversity of such data sources. In this study, we leverage data mining techniques to preprocess and structure multimodal data efficiently. Data mining methods enable us to extract valuable patterns, relationships, and features from different modalities, providing a solid foundation for sub- sequent retrieval tasks. To further enhance the performance of multimodal information retrieval, deep learning techniques are employed. Deep neural networks have demonstrated their effectiveness in various multimedia tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing, and video analysis. By integrating deep learning models into our retrieval framework, we aim to capture complex intermodal dependencies and semantically rich representations, enabling more accurate and context-aware retrieval.

Conditional variational autoencoder for query expansion in ad-hoc information retrieval

Query expansion (QE) is commonly used to improve the performance of traditional information retrieval (IR) models. With the adoption of deep learning in IR research, neural QE models have emerged in recent years. Many of these models focus on learning embeddings by leveraging query-document relevance. These embedding models allow computing semantic similarities between queries and documents to generate expansion terms. However, existing models often ignore query-document interactions. This research aims to address that gap by proposing a QE model using a conditional variational autoencoder. It first maps a query-document pair into a latent space based on their interaction, then estimates an expansion model from that latent space. The proposed model is trained on relevance feedback data and generates expansions using pseudo-relevance feedback at test time. The proposed model is evaluated on three standard TREC collections for document ranking: AP and Robust 04 and GOV02, and the MS MARCO dataset for passage ranking. Results show the model outperforms state-of-the-art traditional and neural QE models. It also demonstrates higher additivity with neural matching than baselines.

A template-based approach for question answering over knowledge bases

In this paper, we address the problem of answering complex questions formulated by users in natural language. Since traditional information retrieval systems are not suitable for complex questions, these questions are usually run over knowledge bases, such as Wikidata or DBpedia. We propose a semi-automatic approach for transforming a natural language question into a SPARQL query that can be easily processed over a knowledge base. The approach applies classification techniques to associate a natural language question with a proper query template from a set of predefined templates. The nature of our approach is semi-automatic as the query templates are manually written by human assessors, who are the experts of the knowledge bases, whereas the classification and query processing steps are completely automatic. Our experiments on the large-scale CSQA dataset for question-answering corroborate the effectiveness of our approach.

SPRF: A semantic Pseudo-relevance Feedback enhancement for information retrieval via ConceptNet

Pseudo-relevance feedback is a widely acclaimed technique for information retrieval. However, traditional information retrieval approaches typically process the original query into individual terms, often overlooking the consideration of the semantic information in the query term itself, by instead focusing on features such as term frequency and inverse document frequency. In this paper, we propose a new semantic-based Pseudo-relevance Feedback model (SPRF) based on the PRF framework. Our SPRF model leverages ConceptNet to provide comprehensive semantic information between terms. It not only considers the query’s importance in the collection but also integrates its semantic information into the PRF framework to enhance the selection of query expansion terms, leading to more precise feedback documents for users. A series of experimental results show that our proposed SPRF model is feasible. Our model achieves good performance in terms of the MAP, P@10, NDCG and MRR metrics and demonstrates advantages over the baseline models, the state-of-the-art models and several neural network-based methods. By comparing and analyzing the methods in a sample case, the extended terms resulting from the proposed model are shown to be in better semantic agreement with the given query.

An efficient ontology model with query execution for accurate document content extraction

<span lang="EN-US">The technique of extracting important documents from massive data collections is known as information retrieval (IR). The dataset provider coupled with the increasing demand for high-quality retrieval results, has resulted in traditional information retrieval approaches being increasingly insufficient to meet the challenge of providing high-quality search results. Research has concentrated on information retrieval and interactive query formation through ontologies in order to overcome these challenges, with a specific emphasis on enhancing the functionality between information and search queries in order to bring the outcome sets closer to the research requirements of users. In the context of document retrieval technologies, it is a process that assists researchers in extracting documents from data collections. It is discussed in this research how to use ontology-based information retrieval approaches and techniques, taking into account the issues of ontology modelling, processing, and the transformation of ontological knowledge into database search queries. In this research work, an efficient optimized ontology model with query execution for content extraction from documents (OOM-QE-CE) is proposed. The existing ontology-to-database transformation and mapping methodologies are also thoroughly examined in terms of data and semantic loss, structural mapping and domain knowledge applicability.</span>

Ontology-based hierarchical retrieval model for digital English teaching information

In order to overcome the low recall and precision of traditional English teaching information retrieval model, this paper designs a hierarchical retrieval model of digital English teaching information based on ontology. TF-IDF and simhash algorithm are used to judge the similarity of digital English teaching database documents and calculate the weight of English teaching information retrieval keywords. Using the relationship between different retrieval concepts to build a semantic network diagram, a hierarchical retrieval model of digital English teaching information was built, the retrieval results according to the user's interest were adjusted, and more accurate retrieval results are obtained. The experimental results show that the recall rate of the model is more than 94%, the precision rate is more than 96%, and the average retrieval time is only 0.44s, which shows that the recall rate and precision rate of the design model are higher, and the retrieval time is shorter.