SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the field of information retrieval.
The following articles are from "Proceedings of the 19th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval":
“Modern system development environments usually deploy the object management facilities of a so-called repository to store the documents created and maintained during system development. PCTE is the ISO and ECMA standard for a public tool interface for an open repository [23]. In this paper we present document retrieval extensions for an OQL-oriented query language for PCTE. The extensions proposed cover (1) pattern matching, (2) term based document retrieval with automatically generated document description vectors, (3) the flexible definition of what is addressed as a "document" in a given query, and (4) the integration of these facilities into a CASE tool. Whereas the integration of pattern matching facilities into query languages has been addressed by other authors before, the main contribution of our approach is the homogeneous integration of term based document retrieval and the flexible definition of documents.”
“Information explosion across the Internet and elsewhere offers access to an increasing number of document collections. In order for users to effectively access these collections, information retrieval (IR) systems must provide coordinated, concurrent, and distributed access. In this paper, we describe a fully functional distributed IR system based on the Inquery unified IR system. To refine this prototype, we implement a flexible simulation model that analyzes performance issues given a wide variety of system parameters and configurations. We present a series of experiments that measure response time, system utilization, and identify bottlenecks. We vary numerous system parameters, such as the number of users, text collections, terms per query, and workload to generalize our results for other distributed IR systems. Based on our initial results, we recommend simple changes to the prototype and evaluate the changes using the simulator. Because of the significant resource demands of information retrieval, it is not difficult to generate workloads that overwhelm system resources regardless of the architecture. However under some realistic workloads, we demonstrate system organizations for which response time gracefully degrades as the workload increases and performance scales with the number of processors. This scalable architecture includes a surprisingly small number of brokers through which a large number of clients and servers communicate.”
“A high performance information filtering system has three main requirements: it must be effective in supplying users with useful information, it must do so in a timely fashion, and it must be able to handle a large throughput of information and a large number of user profiles efficiently. These three requirements pose a difficult problem, and to our knowledge no existing system is capable of meeting all three. In this paper we describe a system which combines a number of techniques from other information retrieval and filtering systems, and is capable of providing high performance on a typical workstation platform. We provide estimates of computing resource usage, and show that our system is also scalable.”
“What elicitations or requests for information do search intermediaries and users with information requests make before and during an information retrieval (IR) interaction -- and for what purposes? These issues were investigated in two studies of elicitations during 40 mediated IR interactions -- including one study of the user elicitation purposes and another of the search intermediary elicitation purposes. A total of 2409 elicitations were identified -- 852 user elicitations within 10 purpose categories and 1557 search intermediary elicitations within 15 purpose categories. The elicitation purposes included requests for information on search terms and strategies, database selection, search procedures, system's outputs and relevance of retrieved items, and users' knowledge and previous information-seeking. Implications for the development of a dialogue-based model of IR interaction and the design of IR systems are also discussed.”
“Designing good user interfaces to information retrieval systems is a complex activity. The design space is large and evaluation methodologies that go beyond the classical precision and recall figures are not well established. In this paper we present an evaluation of an intelligent interface that covers also the user-system interaction and measures user's satisfaction. More specifically, we describe an experiment that evaluates: (i) the added value of the semi-automatic query reformulation implemented in a prototype system; (ii) the importance of technical, terminological, and strategic supports and (iii) the best way to provide them. The interpretation of results leads to guidelines for the design of user interfaces to information retrieval systems and to some observations on the evaluation issue.”
“Proximity queries that involve multiple object types are very common. In this paper, we present a parallel algorithm for answering proximity queries of one kind over object instances that lie in a one-dimensional metric space. The algorithm exploits a specialized hardware, the Dynamic Associative Access Memory chip. In most proximity queries of this kind, the number of object types is less than or equal to three and the distance d, within which object instances are required to locate to satisfy a given proximity condition, is small ([d/80] = 1). The execution time for such queries is linearly proportional to the number of object types and is independent of the size of the database. This allows numerous concurrent users to be serviced. The algorithm is extended to process 2-dimensional proximity queries efficiently.”
“To properly handle concurrent accesses to documents by updates and queries in information retrieval (IR) systems, efforts are on to integrate IR features with database management system (DBMS) features. However, initial research has revealed that DBMS features optimized for traditional databases, display degraded performance while handling text databases. Since efficiency is critical in IR systems, infrastructural extensions are necessary for several DBMS features, transaction support being one of them. This paper focuses on developing efficient transaction support for IR systems where updates and queries arrive dynamically, by exploiting the data characteristics of the indexes as well as of the queries and updates that access the indexes. Results of performance tests on a prototype system demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithms.”
“Retrieving images based on their contents is a difficult problem. Instead of using manually assigned content descriptors for retrieval, we take an approach where images are indexed and organized automatically so that the users can retrieve images by visually browsing the organized image space. For image indexing, the objects in an image are first analyzed for their shape features such as roundness, rectangularity, elipticity, eccentricity, bending energy. These features are used to form a feature vector that represents the image. Subsequently, the feature vectors representing all the images in a image database are organized by a unsupervised neural net learning algorithm called Self-Organizing Map. Since this image feature map reflects the statistical patterns, i.e., the inter-similarities of the objects, the relationships among the images can be recognized by their location, neighborhood, and the way the map is organized. For the feasibility and practicality of the approach, a prototype system has been developed and tested with some experiments.”
“Phonetic matching is used in applications such as name retrieval, where the spelling of a name is used to identify other strings that are likely to be of similar pronunciation. In this paper we explain the parallels between information retrieval and phonetic matching, and describe our new phonetic matching techniques. Our experimental comparison with existing techniques such as Soundex and edit distances, which is based on recall and precision, demonstrates that the new techniques are superior. In addition, reasoning from the similarity of phonetic matching and information retrieval, we have applied combination of evidence to phonetic matching. Our experiments with combining demonstrate that it leads to substantial improvements in effectiveness.”
“Traditional approaches to information retrieval are based upon representing a user's query as a bag of query terms and a document as a bag of index terms and computing a degree of similarity between the two based on the overlap or number of query terms in common between them. Our long-term approach to IR applications is based upon precomputing semantically-based word-word similarities, work which is described elsewhere, and using these as part of the document-query similarity measure. A basic premise of our word-to-word similarity measure is that the input to this computation is the correct or intended word sense but in information retrieval applications, automatic and accurate word sense disambiguation remains an unsolved problem. In this paper we describe our first successful application of these ideas to an information retrieval application, specifically the indexing and retrieval of captions describing the content of images. We have hand-captioned 2714 images and to circumvent, for the time being, the problems raised by word sense disambiguation, we manually disambiguated polysemous words in captions. We have also built a collection of 60 queries and for each, determined relevance assessments. Using this environment we were able to run experiments in which we varied how the query-caption similarity measure used our pre-computed word-word semantic distances. Our experiments, reported in the paper, show significant improvement for this environment over the more traditional approaches to information retrieval.”
“This paper describes a procedure for automatically linking thesauri. Such inter-thesauri linking will enable a user to query a database using terms from a thesaurus that was not used to index the database. The procedure uses a data driven approach for linking. Practical implementation using single link technique and a case study linking terms from Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors and Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms is described.”
“Ad-hoc retrieval relies on the evidence from a user's query to provide a sufficient variety of terms as well as different term frequencies for differentiating term importance. Short queries lack both types of information. A new method of automatically weighting query terms for ad-hoc retrieval is introduced that works for short queries. It is based on the term usage statistics in a collection and no training is required. Experiments with both the TREC2 and TREC4 ad-hoc queries show that this weighting scheme can provide significantly better results at the initial retrieval stage. At the expanded query stage, results vary from equal to significantly better than those relying on the original query weights. In particular, this automatic method provides similar improvements to extra short queries of two to four content terms only.”
“A Terminological Logic is presented as an information retrieval model, with a four-valued semantics that gives to its inference relation the flavour of relevance, that is a strict connection in meaning between the premises and the conclusion of the arguments licensed by the logic. The logic also permits the expression of meta-knowledge enforcing a closed-world reading of the knowledge concerning specified individuals and primitive concepts. A Gentzen-style, sound and complete calculus for reasoning in the logic is given, thus establishing the basis for an information retrieval engine.”
“The reduction in cost of both local area and wide area communications has spawned interest in new uses of computer systems. However, the Internet is only at the same stage that television was in the fifties. The talk will deal with how the communications facilities, end-point architectures, and applications may develop. This will focus on a "Network Computer" comprising a range of simple networked end-points used in various combinations. A prototype system used for multimedia applications will be illustrated. A class of applications dealing with ubiquitous personalisation will be described. Finally the likelyhood of a turn-back to centralised systems for ease of management will be considered.”
“The aggregated structure of documents plays a key role in full-text, multimedia, and network Information Retrieval (IR). Considering aggregation provides new querying facilities and improves retrieval effectiveness. We present a knowledge representation for IR purposes which pays special attention to this aggregated structure of objects. In addition, further features of objects can be described. Thus, the structure of full-text documents, the heterogeneity and the spatial and temporal relationships of objects typical for multimedia IR, and meta information for network IR are representable within one integrated framework. The model we propose allows for querying on the content of documents (objects) as well as on other features. The query result may contain objects having different types. Instead of retrieving only whole documents, the retrieval process determines the least aggregated entities that imply the query.”
“Automatic information retrieval systems have to deal with documents of varying lengths in a text collection. Document length normalization is used to fairly retrieve documents of all lengths. In this study, we observe that a normalization scheme that retrieves documents of all lengths with similar chances as their likelihood of relevance will outperform another scheme which retrieves documents with chances very different from their likelihood of relevance. We show that the retrieval probabilities for a particular normalization method deviate systematically from the relevance probabilities across different collections. We present pivoted normalization, a technique that can be used to modify any normalization function thereby reducing the gap between the relevance and the retrieval probabilities. Training pivoted normalization on one collection, we can successfully use it on other (new) text collections, yielding a robust, collection independent normalization technique. We use the idea of pivoting with the well known cosine normalization function. We point out some shortcomings of the cosine function and present two new normalization functions -- pivoted unique normalization and pivoted byte size normalization.”
“There is a difficulty in applying the conventional word-based indexing to Korean. The indexable segment of a word, i.e. stem is often a compound noun, which results in the serious decrease of retrieval effectiveness. The morpheme-based indexing, which decomposes a compound noun into simple nouns, has been developed to overcome the problem of compound nouns. It, however, requires a large dictionary and complex linguistic knowledge. In this paper we propose a new indexing method by combining the word-based indexing and the n-gram indexing. The proposed method alleviates the problem of compound nouns without dictionaries and linguistic knowledge. Experimental results show that the proposed method might be almost as effective as the morpheme-based indexing.”
“In previous studies, Chinese text retrieval has often been dealt with on the character basis. This approach is not suited to deal with complex queries. We suggest that Chinese text retrieval should work with words instead of characters. The crucial problem is to segment originally continuous Chinese texts into words. In this paper, we first propose a hybrid segmentation approach which unifies the commonly used approaches. The system SMART is then adapted to index the segmented Chinese texts. Finally, we suggest that Chinese text retrieval should move further to include a thesaurus in order to cope with the rich vocabulary of Chinese.”
“We present a deductive data model for concept-based query expansion. It is based on three abstraction levels: the conceptual, linguistic and occurrence levels. Concepts and relationships among them are represented at the conceptual level. The expression level represents natural language expressions for concepts. Each expression has one or more matching models at the occurrence level. The models specify the matching or the expression in database indices built in varying ways. The data model supports a concept-based query expansion and formulation tool, the ExpansionTool, for heterogeneous IR system environments. Expansion is controlled by adjustable matching reliability.”
“This work explores the use of plausible inferences as a means of retrieving relevant documents. Collins and Michalski's theory of plausible reasoning has been modified to accommodate information retrieval. Methods are proposed to represent document contents by logical terms and statements, and queries by incomplete logical statements. Extensions to plausible inferences are discussed. Two versions of the extended plausible reasoning system were implemented, one using dominance weights (described in the paper) and the other using tf*idf (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) weights. Experiments were conducted using the titles and abstracts of the CACM collection and it was found that both versions of the extended plausible reasoning system are better than the vector space model and the system using dominance weights performed better than the system with tf*idf weights.”
“We introduce a belief network model for IR which is derived from probabilistic considerations over a clearly defined sample space. This model subsumes the classical models in IR and generalizes the inference network model of Turtle and Croft. Further, we show how to extend the model with information from other queries (which we call contexts) to yield improved retrieval performance.”
“Although statistical retrieval models are now accepted widely, there has been little research on how to adapt them to the demands of high speed document filtering. The problems of document retrieval and document filtering are similar at an abstract level, but the architectures required, the optimizations that are possible, and the quality of the information available, are all different. This paper describes a new statistical document filtering system called InRoute, the problems of filtering effectiveness and efficiency that arise with such a system, and experiments with various solutions.”
“We use data from the TREC routing experiments to explore how relevance feedback can be applied incrementally -- using a few judged documents each time -- to achieve results that are as good as if the feedback occurred in one pass. We show that relatively few judgments are needed to get high-quality results. We also demonstrate methods that reduce the amount of information archived from past judged documents without adversely affecting effectiveness. A novel simulation shows that such techniques are useful for handling long-standing queries with drifting notions of relevance.”
“There is strong empirical and theoretic evidence that combination of retrieval methods can improve performance. In this paper, we systematically compare combination strategies in the context of document filtering, using queries from the Tipster reference corpus. We find that simple averaging strategies do indeed improve performance, but that direct averaging of probability estimates is not the correct approach. Instead, the probability estimates must be renormalized using logistic regression on the known relevance judgements. We examine more complex combination strategies but find them less successful due to the high correlations among our filtering methods which are optimized over the same training data and employ similar document representations.”
“Three different types of classifiers were investigated in the context of a text categorization problem in the medical domain: the automatic assignment of ICD9 codes to dictated inpatient discharge summaries. K-nearest-neighbor, relevance feedback, and Bayesian independence classifiers were applied individually and in combination. A combination of different classifiers produced better results than any single type of classifier. For this specific medical categorization problem, new query formulation and weighting methods used in the k-nearest-neighbor classifier improved performance.”
“Systems for text retrieval, routing, categorization and other IR tasks rely heavily on linear classifiers. We propose that two machine learning algorithms, the Widrow-Hoff and EG algorithms, be used in training linear text classifiers. In contrast to most IR methods, theoretical analysis provides performance guarantees and guidance on parameter settings for these algorithms. Experimental data is presented showing Widrow-Hoff and EG to be more effective than the widely used Rocchio algorithm on several categorization and routing tasks.”
“This paper presents domain-independent methods of spoken document retrieval. Both a continuous-speech large vocabulary recognition system, and a phone-lattice word spotter, are used to locate index units within an experimental corpus of voice messages. Possible index terms are nearly unconstrained; terms not in a 20,000 word recognition system vocabulary can be identified by the word spotter at search time. Though either system alone can yield respectable retrieval performance, the two methods are complementary and work best in combination. Different ways of combining them are investigated, and it is shown that the best of these can increase retrieval average precision for a speaker-independent retrieval system to 85% of that achieved for full-text transcriptions of the test documents.”
“Two recently implemented machine learning algorithms, RIPPER and sleeping experts for phrases, are evaluated on a number of large text categorization problems. These algorithms both construct classifiers that allow the "context" of a word w to affect how (or even whether) the presence or absence of w will contribute to a classification. However, RIPPER and sleeping experts differ radically in many other respects: differences include different notions as to what constitutes a context, different ways of combining contexts to construct a classifier, different methods to search for a combination of contexts, and different criteria as to what contexts should be included in such a combination. In spite of these differences, both RIPPER and sleeping experts perform extremely well across a wide variety of categorization problems, generally outperforming previously applied learning methods. We view this result as a confirmation of the usefulness of classifiers that represent contextual information.”
“Several machine learning approaches have been proposed in the literature to automatically learn user interests for information filtering. However, many of them are ill-equipped to deal with changes in user interests that may occur due to changes in the user's personal and professional situations. If undetected over a long time, such changes may cause significant degradation in the filtering performance and user satisfaction during the period of non-detection. In this paper, we present a two-level learning approach to cope with such non-stationary user interests. While the lower level consists of a standard convergence-type machine learning algorithm, the higher level uses Bayesian analysis of the user provided relevance feedback to detect shifts in user interests. Once such a shift is detected, the lower-level learning algorithm is suitably reinitialized to quickly adapt to the new user profile. Experimental results with simulated users are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.”
“This article is concerned with the design and implementation of Information Retrieval Systems (IRS). We show how theories and models from the domain of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can be applied to the design of IRS. We first study the user's tasks by modelling the mental activities of the user while accomplishing a task. Adopting a system perspective, we consider the processing tasks of an IRS and organize them in a design space. We then build upon the design space to consider the implications of such data processing and levels of abstraction on software design. Finally we present PAC-Amodeus, a software architecture model and illustrate the applicability of the approach with the implementation of an IRS: the TIAPRI system.”
“This panel, emphasizing audience participation, will focus on issues in building and using test collections for information retrieval. There is currently interest in building new test collections in many languages, or for different types of media. This panel presents an opportunity to share experiences gained from past test collection building and usage to help guide the development of these new test collections. The Cranfield studies (Cleverdon et al. 1966) emphasized the importance of creating test collections and using these for comparative evaluation of retrieval systems. Now, thirty years later, we are dealing with a major increase in the amount and type of information available for searching, and also working in an interactive environment instead of the old batch retrieval mode. This does not eliminate the need for static test collections, but does require a re-examination of how to build and use these collections.”
“WING (Whole Interactive Nara Guide) is a system to enable smooth information retrieval by integrating multiple search strategies such as 3-D map visualization, hypertext, keyword search, and category search with the same smooth zooming interface. Nara, located about 40 kilometers south of Kyoto, is an ancient capital of Japan and full of tourist attractions like old shrines and temples. Using WING, any vague knowledge about the data can be utilized to narrow the search space, and users can smoothly navigate through Nara at will, by modifying the search area in each view.”
“Envision, a multimedia digital library of computer science literature, is unique in the variety of document characteristics visualized and in the flexibility afforded users to change the visualization to suit their current information needs. Envision's Graphic View window displays search results as a matrix of icons. Using controls provided in the user interface, the layout of the matrix may be changed to visualize estimated relevance to query, publication year, document type, document size, author names, and index terms. Icon characteristics used in the visualizations include placement relative to the x-axis and y-axis and an alphanumeric icon label, as well as icon size, shape, and color. Visualizations supporting a wide range of user tasks will be demonstrated.”
“During the last years, MUSIC has undertaken a number of competitive research and development projects in the area of multimedia tourism information systems. A powerful model has been elaborated supporting the detailed description of areas of touristic interest with their sites and facilities hierarchically organized. An extensive multimedia information base for the region of Crete has been established. Tools have been developed to maintain this information base. A hypermedia model has been implemented in order to create hypermedia presentations with detailed and accurate geographic maps, diagrams and architectural sketches. Commercially available tools have been integrated for creating synthetic multimedia presentations, virtual navigations, and multimedia data processing. Graphical queries supported are classified into (a) boolean queries, that are expressed graphically on trees representing type hierarchies and (b) similarity queries, that are meaningful only for type hierarchies with weights. These two classes of queries can be combined together. The CD-ROM of Crete is an Interactive Multimedia Tourism Application developed on this Software Bench that exploits all the above mentioned capabilities.”
“Texts vary not only by topic. Indeed, stylistic variation between texts of the same topic is often at least as noticeable as the variation between texts of different topic but same genre. This variation is straightforward to compute; distinguishing genres can be done with reasonable precision. This experiment uses a large collection of documents and information retrieval queries, where a subset of documents have been hand-judged for relevance to the queries. The experiment shows that this subset differs significantly from the rest of the corpus in terms of the stylistic metrics studied. This variation is more marked if the corpus is partitioned into stylistically homogeneous subcorpora. It remains to be investigated how general the results are. They may be at least partly an effect of the underlying text genres; they are certainly to a large extent an effect of the specific task and information retrieval scenario the human judges sought to emulate. This experiment shows that for a certain set of users and for a certain scenario a clear bias towards certain types of text can be found: these results should be taken as a starting point in investigating how situations affect measures of stylistic variation.”
“By allowing a rapid input from the keyboard, those normally having great difficulty in using one in the normal way, this project is working on an initial computing solution. The objective is to propose to the software user, in as short a time as possible, the word to be written. The idea is as follows: to look up in an electronic dictionary, depending on the start of the text already input and the first letters of the word being input, a list of the most commonly used words in the most plausible grammatical category/ies depending on the context on its left. The user would select from such a list the desired word or should it not be given, a new letter. This system guarantees an impressive rate of input. To this software one will associate an electronic dictionary with morphological and syntax characteristics as well as as a learning system allowing the software to be adapted to the individual user.”
“Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with facilitating users' access to large amounts of (predominantly textual) information. In the 1980s, hypertext was introduced as an interactive, dynamic user interface style that did away with complicated query syntaxes typical of IR systems of the day. In this work, we propose a logical continuum of interface functionality that unites traditional information retrieval and hypertext interfaces. We describe VOIR, an information exploration interface that combines the immediacy and user-centeredness of hypertext interfaces with the flexibility and generality of modern information retrieval algorithms. This interface, implemented in a software prototype, presents the search results in parallel (newspaper-style), enabling the user to compare search results and to evaluate the effectiveness of the query. It uses term frequency heuristics to identify terms that will serve as anchors, and uses the context around the selected anchor to determine the collection of destination documents. The algorithms developed in this prototype are being applied to a Web-based dynamic hypertext.”
“OLISTICO is an experimental evaluation environment where different methodological tools can be applied to evaluate the effectiveness of various types of interactive IR applications and systems. Problems of measuring system performance at interaction level with real users are addressed. Understanding of methodological consequences of taking an evaluation user-oriented paradigm, and developing of a conceptual framework within which collect and integrate qualitative and quantitative data on user information-seeking behaviour are faced. In the context of DUO-OPAC and Legal Documents hypertext HyperLaw2 evaluation studies OLISTICO made use of online questionnaires to identify user's profiles and interface effectiveness, transaction log to analyse different navigation strategies through available semantic structures, and ASL way of search length measuring in Hypertext IR systems. An "activity-centred" methodology is going to be embodied in the environment to establish if specific applications fit users real information needs as they emerge in the everyday practice, and evaluate expert workers interaction with IR tools, in their natural settings, as a way of accomplishing their typical working tasks. Therefore a new HIR system which implements HyperLaw2 model but with capabilities of managing different and new types of document collections is under development. Repeating the experiments with a more generalised system gives opportunities of evaluating the HIR model the systems are based on, and making the used evaluation methods more general and independent of any knowledge domain. Furthermore this study is giving insights on how to develop applications to enhance the quality of user-tasks performance within the context of computer-supported working activities.”
“The meeting will begin with 2 hours of presentations: * Activities of the SIGIR Education Committee * Aids to teaching about evaluation * Hypertext and hypermedia requirements * Needs in Europe and Asia * Requirements of potential employers of those trained in the IR field The rest of the morning will deal with the problem of defining an IR curriculum: what courses can be agreed upon at the undergraduate, masters, and PhD levels (and at similar levels in non-US-type educational systems), and what "knowledge modules" can be defined and put together in several ways to suit a variety of course sequences. At the end of the morning session the workshop will break into groups so that each course and knowledge module can be covered by those best suited. Initial discussions can begin over lunch. After lunch, each workshop group will meet in a separate room. During a 2 hour period a draft syllabus for each course or knowledge module will be developed. After another break, the groups will all meet together for a closing plenary, presenting their conclusions. Discussion will lead to refinements of group reports. The workshop report will appear in Forum to stimulate discussion in the IR community of the proposed curriculum.”
“The recent and rapid growth of the Internet and corporate intranets poses new problems for Information Retrieval. There is now a need for tools that help people navigate the network, select which collections to search, and fuse the results returned from searching multiple collections. These problems are being addressed by the international IR research community and a number of digital library projects around the world, e.g. the U.S. Digital Libraries projects, the ERCIM Digital Libraries projects, and the German MEDOC project. The goal of this workshop is to bring together people from each of these areas to discuss their varying approaches to common problems. Researchers are invited to submit position papers or extended abstracts discussing novel approaches to the following problems: * Resource selection: selecting from among a set of collections or databases; * Data fusion: merging or fusing results from different collections or databases; * Archival retrieval methods for heterogeneous objects; * Metaknowledge; * Consistency; * Multilingual environments; * User interfaces; and * Architectures for networked information retrieval.”
“Automatic query expansion has long been suggested as a technique for dealing with the fundamental issue of word mismatch in information retrieval. A number of approaches to expansion have been studied and, more recently, attention has focused on techniques that analyze the corpus to discover word relationships (global techniques) and those that analyze documents retrieved by the initial query (local feedback). In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of these approaches and show that, although global analysis has some advantages, local analysis is generally more effective. We also show that using global analysis techniques, such as word context and phrase structure, on the local set of documents produces results that are both more effective and more predictable than simple local feedback.”
“Previous research on stemming has shown both positive and negative effects on retrieval performance. This paper describes an experiment in which several linguistic and non-linguistic stemmers are evaluated on a Dutch test collection. Experiments especially focus on the measurement of Recall. Results show that linguistic stemming restricted to inflection yields a significant improvement over full linguistic and non-linguistic stemming, both in average Precision and R-Recall. Best results are obtained with a linguistic stemmer which is enhanced with compound analysis. This version has a significantly better Recall than a system without stemming, without a significant deterioration of Precision.”
“The multilingual information retrieval system of the future will need to be able to retrieve documents across language boundaries. This extension of the classical IR problem is particularly challenging, as significant resources are required to perform query translation. At Xerox, we are working to build a multilingual IR system and conducting a series of experiments to understand what factors are most important in making the system work. Using translated queries and a bilingual transfer dictionary, we have learned that cross-language multilingual IR is feasible, although performance lags considerably behind the monolingual standard. The experiments suggest that correct identification and translation of multi-word terminology is the single most important source of error in the system, although ambiguity in translation also contributes to poor performance.”
“We introduce a new approach to multilingual information retrieval based on the use of thesaurus-based query expansion techniques applied over a collection of comparable multilingual documents. This approach has been built into the SPIDER information retrieval system and has been tested over a large collection of Italian documents. We have shown that the SPIDER system retrieves Italian documents in response to user queries written in German with better effectiveness than a baseline system evaluating Italian queries against Italian documents. Although the importance of the SPIDER stemming algorithm for Italian must be stressed in these results we have also achieved performance on multilingual retrieval tasks within 32% of the best SPIDER performance on Italian retrieval by including a relevance feedback loop in the task of multilingual retrieval.”
“A digital library of computer science literature, Envision provides powerful information visualization by displaying search results as a matrix of icons, with layout semantics under user control. Envision's Graphic View interacts with an Item Summary Window giving users access to bibliographic information, and XMosaic provides access to complete bibliographic information, abstracts, and full content. While many visualization interfaces for information retrieval systems depict ranked query-document similarity, Envision graphically presents a variety of document characteristics and supports an extensive range of user tasks. Formative usability evaluation results show great user satisfaction with Envision's style of presentation and the document characteristics visualized.”
“We present Scatter/Gather, a cluster-based document browsing method, as an alternative to ranked titles for the organization and viewing of retrieval results We systematically evaluate Scatter/Gather in this context and find significant improvements over similarity search ranking alone. This result provides evidence validating the cluster hypothesis which states that relevant documents tend to be more similar to each other than to non-relevant documents. We describe a system employing Scatter/Gather and demonstrate that users are able to use this system close to its full potential.”
“We report on the design and evaluation of a visualization tool for Information Retrieval (IR) systems that aims to help the end user in the following respects: * As an indicator of document relevance, the tool graphically provides specific query related information about individual documents * As a diagnosis tool, it graphically provides aggregate information about the query results that could help in identifying how the different query terms influence the retrieval and ranking of documents. Two different experiments using TREC-4 data were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this tool. Results, while mixed, indicate that visualization of this sort may provide useful support for judging the relevance of documents, in particular by enabling users to make more accurate decisions about which documents to inspect in detail. Problems in evaluation of such tools in interactive environments are discussed.”
“A user-interface architecture, called FireWorks, is described. It consists of a domain-specific toolkit and frameworks for building information retrieval applications. The architecture's expressiveness is demonstrated by first describing an example application, which is designed to help searchers coordinate access to multiple on-line sources. Second, FireWorks is compared to a similar architecture, called InfoGrid. The comparison focuses debate on what software abstractions arc required for implementing a range of effective environments for information seeking.”
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Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience.
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-- David Liddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996
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URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_the_19th_annual_international_acm_sigir_conference_on_research_and_development_in_information_retrieval.html
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Mar 21st, 2010
