Search personalization through query and page topical analysis

Thousands of users issue keyword queries to the Web search engines to find information on a number of topics. Since the users may have diverse backgrounds and may have different expectations for a given query, some search engines try to personalize their results to better match the overall interests of an individual user. This task involves two great challenges. First the search engines need to be able to effectively identify the user interests and build a profile for every individual user. Second, once such a profile is available, the search engines need to rank the results in a way that matches the interests of a given user. In this article, we present our work towards a personalized Web search engine and we discuss how we addressed each of these challenges. Since users are typically not willing to provide information on their personal preferences, for the first challenge, we attempt to determine such preferences by examining the click history of each user. In particular, we leverage a topical ontology for estimating a user’s topic preferences based on her past searches, i.e. previously issued queries and pages visited for those queries. We then explore the semantic similarity between the user’s current query and the query-matching pages, in order to identify the user’s current topic preference. For the second challenge, we have developed a ranking function that uses the learned past and current topic preferences in order to rank the search results to better match the preferences of a given user. Our experimental evaluation on the Google query-stream of human subjects over a period of 1 month shows that user preferences can be learned accurately through the use of our topical ontology and that our ranking function which takes into account the learned user preferences yields significant improvements in the quality of the search results.     

基于色彩传递的图像马赛克算法研究

针对传统图像马赛克算法中的瓦片图像颜色调整问题,提出一种基于全局色彩传递的图像马赛克算法,提高瓦片图像对源图像颜色空间的拟合阶数,在此基础上采用矩形碎片图像拼贴方式实现了相应的马赛克系统。实验结果表明,该算法能够获得良好的性能。     

基于语义查询扩展的垂直搜索研究

基于关键词的搜索引擎无法满足用户需求,传统查询扩展方式又会带来许多语义理解错误,针对该问题,提出一种基于本体的垂直搜索引擎概念模型,建立基于关键词和基于概念的两层索引结构,利用行业领域本体对用户提交的关键词进行语义查询扩展,并对按照本体标注的文档进行排序优化,提高查询的查全率和查准率。     

基于用户日志挖掘的查询扩展方法

查询扩展可以有效地消除查询歧义,提高信息检索的准确率和召回率.通过挖掘用户日志中查询词和相关文档的连接关系,构造关联查询,并在此基础上提出一种从关联查询中提取查询扩展词的查询扩展方法.同时,还提出一种查询歧义的判别方法,该方法可以对查询词所表达的检索意图的模糊程度进行有效度量,也可以对查询词的检索性能进行预先估计.通过对查询歧义的度量来动态调整扩展词的长度,提高查询扩展模型的灵活性和适应能力.     

基于领域本体的贝叶斯网络检索模型研究

针对传统的信息检索方法无法实现用户查询的语义理解、检索效率低等问题,本文提出基于领域本体进行查询扩展的贝叶斯网络检索模型。该模型首先将用户查询通过领域本体进行语义扩展,然后将扩展后的查询作为证据在贝叶斯网络检索模型中进行传播,进而得到查询结果,实验表明本文提出的贝叶斯网络检索模型能提高检索效率。     

Towards a graph-based user profile modeling for a session-based personalized search

Most Web search engines use the content of the Web documents and their link structures to assess the relevance of the document to the user’s query. With the growth of the information available on the web, it becomes difficult for such Web search engines to satisfy the user information need expressed by few keywords. First, personalized information retrieval is a promising way to resolve this problem by modeling the user profile by his general interests and then integrating it in a personalized document ranking model. In this paper, we present a personalized search approach that involves a graph-based representation of the user profile. The user profile refers to the user interest in a specific search session defined as a sequence of related queries. It is built by means of score propagation that allows activating a set of semantically related concepts of reference ontology, namely the ODP. The user profile is maintained across related search activities using a graph-based merging strategy. For the purpose of detecting related search activities, we define a session boundary recognition mechanism based on the Kendall rank correlation measure that tracks changes in the dominant concepts held by the user profile relatively to a new submitted query. Personalization is performed by re-ranking the search results of related queries using the user profile. Our experimental evaluation is carried out using the HARD 2003 TREC collection and showed that our session boundary recognition mechanism based on the Kendall measure provides a significant precision comparatively to other non-ranking based measures like the cosine and the WebJaccard similarity measures. Moreover, results proved that the graph-based search personalization is effective for improving the search accuracy.     

一种自适应语义Web检索方法

基于内容的语义Web检索只考虑内容本身,没有考虑用户的不同,不能准确反映用户需求。为此,提出一个自适应语义Web检索框架,对于Web中文文档,借助HowNet知识库给出一种本体学习方法,通过提取用户客观、显式和隐式信息建立用户信息库,并设计用户初始查询本体和个性化查询本体构建算法,从而实现用户的自适应检索。实验结果表明,该方法具有较高的检索效率。     

Learning and inferencing in user ontology for personalized Semantic Web search

User modeling is aimed at capturing the users’ interests in a working domain, which forms the basis of providing personalized information services. In this paper, we present an ontology based user model, called user ontology, for providing personalized information service in the Semantic Web. Different from the existing approaches that only use concepts and taxonomic relations for user modeling, the proposed user ontology model utilizes concepts, taxonomic relations, and non-taxonomic relations in a given domain ontology to capture the users’ interests. As a customized view of the domain ontology, a user ontology provides a richer and more precise representation of the user’s interests in the target domain. Specifically, we present a set of statistical methods to learn a user ontology from a given domain ontology and a spreading activation procedure for inferencing in the user ontology. The proposed user ontology model with the spreading activation based inferencing procedure has been incorporated into a semantic search engine, called OntoSearch, to provide personalized document retrieval services. The experimental results, based on the ACM digital library and the Google Directory, support the efficacy of the user ontology approach to providing personalized information services.     

个性化搜索中的用户特征模型研究

用户特征的描述方式是实现个性化搜索算法的核心因素。针对传统的基于关键词向量空间模型的用户特征描述过于简单,不能全面描述用户兴趣的缺陷,将folksonomy的结构与本体概念的清晰语义相结合,提出一种多层用户特征描述方式。从用户兴趣主题、用户间关联两个不同角度,从用户生成的标签、标记的文档及主题等不同层次建立用户特征描述模型,并将其应用于个性化搜索过程的方式进行分析。同时对个性化搜索的结果评价方式、资源类型对用户特征及搜索结果的影响进行了讨论。在Delicious和Flickr两种不同类型数据集上的实验表明,所提出用户特征模型能够有效提高个性化搜索结果的性能。     

Natural language technology and query expansion: issues, state-of-the-art and perspectives

The availability of an abundance of knowledge sources has spurred a large amount of effort in the development and enhancement of Information Retrieval techniques. Users’ information needs are expressed in natural language and successful retrieval is very much dependent on the effective communication of the intended purpose. Natural language queries consist of multiple linguistic features which serve to represent the intended search goal. Linguistic characteristics that cause semantic ambiguity and misinterpretation of queries as well as additional factors such as the lack of familiarity with the search environment affect the users’ ability to accurately represent their information needs, coined by the concept “intention gap”. The latter directly affects the relevance of the returned search results which may not be to the users’ satisfaction and therefore is a major issue impacting the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Central to our discussion is the identification of the significant constituents that characterize the query intent and their enrichment through the addition of meaningful terms, phrases or even latent representations, either manually or automatically to capture their intended meaning. Specifically, we discuss techniques to achieve the enrichment and in particular those utilizing the information gathered from statistical processing of term dependencies within a document corpus or from external knowledge sources such as ontologies. We lay down the anatomy of a generic linguistic based query expansion framework and propose its module-based decomposition, covering topical issues from query processing, information retrieval, computational linguistics and ontology engineering. For each of the modules we review state-of-the-art solutions in the literature categorized and analyzed under the light of the techniques used.     

基于加权本体的个性化语义搜索

为了实现语义层次上的个性化搜索,建立了一个集成语义信息和用户偏好的加权本体,在此基础上给出了一个个性化搜索框架WOPS.WOPS能够在利用本体描述用户兴趣模型的同时,进一步地将本体蕴涵的语义信息应用于个性化搜索的过程中.最后通过实验证明了基于加权本体的个性化搜索的有效性.     

基于短期记忆与遗忘系数的用户个性化建模方法研究

搜索引擎的一个标准是不同的用户用相同的查询条件检索时,返回的结果相同。为解决准确性问题,个性化搜索引擎被提出,它可以根据用户的不同个性化特征提供不同的搜索结果。然而,现有的方法更注重用户的长时记忆和独立的用户日志文件,从而降低了个性化搜索的有效性。获取用户短时记忆模型来提供准确有效的用户偏好的个性化搜索方法被广泛采用。首先,根据基于查询关键词的相关概念生成短期记忆模型;接着,基于用户的时序有效点击数据生成用户个性化模型;最后,在用户会话中引入了遗忘因子来优化用户个性化模型。实验结果表明,所提出的方法可以较好地表达用户信息需求,较为准确地构建用户的个性化模型。     

一种基于本体的知识库语义扩展搜索方法

为使知识库的信息搜索突破传统基于关键字查询的局限,提出一种基于本体的知识库语义扩展搜索方法。将本体和语义扩展引入知识库,对用户查询条件进行扩展搜索,通过相关度分析对搜索结果进行排序,使搜索效果得到优化。实验结果表明,该方法能提高搜索查全率和查准率。     

基于用户兴趣的查询扩展语义模型

自然语言中词的同义现象和歧义现象一直是降低信息检索查全率和查准率的关键,在Web搜索引擎上显得更加突出。提出了一种基于用户兴趣的查询扩展语义模型,通过构建基于Yahoo的语义ontology知识库消除同义现象,设计客户端的用户兴趣挖掘模型消除歧义现象。实验结果显示该方法能有效提高Web信息检索的查全率与查准率。     

Semantic relation based personalized ranking approach for engineering document retrieval

Since engineering design is heavily informational, engineers want to retrieve existing engineering documents accurately during the product development process. However, engineers have difficulties searching for documents because of low retrieval accuracy. One of the reasons for this is the limitation of existing document ranking approaches, in which relationships between terms in documents are not considered to assess the relevance of the retrieved documents. Therefore, we propose a new ranking approach that provides more correct evaluation of document relevance to a given query. Our approach exploits domain ontology to consider relationships among terms in the relevance scoring process. Based on domain ontology, the semantics of a document are represented by a graph (called Document Semantic Network) and, then, proposed relation-based weighting schemes are used to evaluate the graph to calculate the document relevance score. In our ranking approach, user interests and searching intent are also considered in order to provide personalized services. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing ranking approaches. A precisely represented semantics of a document as a graph and multiple relation-based weighting schemes are important factors underlying the notable improvement.     

个性化的社会标签查询扩展技术研究

随着互联网上的信息日益增长,个性化的搜索需求越来越迫切,由于用户兴趣的不同和行为的差异,如何为不同的用户提供不同的检索结果成为一个具有挑战性的问题。首先对现有搜索引擎的个性化信息检索和查询扩展技术进行了分类总结,分析了它们各自的优缺点。然后提出了基于社会化标签的个性化查询词扩展方法。这些方法通过从用户所收藏的社会化标签或标签所对应的网页中提取出和用户查询词相关的词,来对用户的初始查询进行扩展。最后利用Delicious网站上的用户数据,对比研究了这几种个性化查询扩展算法。通过与Google进行对比分析实验,结果表明所提出的社会化标签的个性化查询词扩展方法能够较好地满足用户的个性化需求,检索结果比Google的检索结果更接近用户需求。     

Learning Query Ambiguity Models by Using Search Logs

dentifying ambiguous queries is crucial to research on personalized Web search and search result diversity. Intuitively, query logs contain valuable information on how many intentions users have when issuing a query. However, previous work showed user clicks alone are misleading in judging a query as being ambiguous or not. In this paper, we address the problem of learning a query ambiguity model by using search logs. First, we propose enriching a query by mining the documents clicked by users and the relevant follow up queries in a session. Second, we use a text classifier to map the documents and the queries into predefined categories. Third, we propose extracting features from the processed data. Finally, we apply a state-of-the-art algorithm, Support Vector Machine (SVM), to learn a query ambiguity classifier. Experimental results verify that the sole use of click based features or session based features perform worse than the previous work based on top retrieved documents. When we combine the two sets of features, our proposed approach achieves the best effectiveness, specifically 86% in terms of accuracy. It significantly improves the click based method by 5.6% and the session based method by 4.6%.     

On the query refinement in the ontology-based searching for information

One of the main problems in the (web) information retrieval is the ambiguity of users’ queries, since they tend to post very short queries which do not express their information need clearly. This seems to be valid for the ontology-based information retrieval in which the domain ontology is used as the backbone of the searching process. In this paper, we present a novel approach for determining possible refinements of an ontology-based query. The approach is based on measuring the ambiguity of a query with respect to the original user's information need. We defined several types of the ambiguities concerning the structure of the underlying ontology and the content of the information repository. These ambiguities are interpreted regarding the user's information need, which we infer from the user's behaviour in searching process. Finally, the ranked list of the potentially useful refinements of her query is provided to the user. We present a small evaluation study that shows the advantages of the proposed approach.     

基于语义Web的搜索引擎研究

传统搜索引擎是基于关键字的检索,然而文档的关键字未必和文档有关,而相关的文档也未必显式地包含此关键字。基于语义Web的搜索引擎利用本体技术,可以很好地对关键字进行语义描述。当收到用户提交的搜索请求时,先在已经建立好的本体库的基础上对该请求进行概念推理,然后将推理结果提交给传统的搜索引擎,最终将搜索结果返回给用户。相对于传统的搜索引擎,基于语义Web的搜索引擎有效地提高了搜索的查全率和查准率。     

基于领域本体的语义查询扩展

在信息检索研究领域,资源与查询词的匹配决定信息检索质量。现有检索方法的检索结果存在过多不相关信息,不能很好满足用户需求。针对传统信息检索存在的问题与当前语义查询扩展方法的特点,本文在分析各种语义查询扩展方法及其相关研究的基础上,提出一种改进的基于领域本体的语义查询扩展方法。该方法论通过本体模型和概念相似度的计算对检索信息进行检索意图树的构建并扩展;然后在资源本体中以最短路径的方式搜索资源。实验结果表明,本文方法相较其他查询扩展方法能得到更好的检索结果。