Visual exploration and retrieval of XML document collections with the generic system X2

This article reports on the XML retrieval system x² that has been developed at the University of Munich over the last 5 years. In a typical session with x², the user first browses a structural summary of the XML database in order to select interesting elements and keywords occurring in documents. Using this intermediate result, queries combining structure and textual references are composed semiautomatically. After query evaluation, the full set of answers is presented in a visual and structured way. x² largely exploits the structure found in documents, queries and answers to enable new interactive visualization and exploration techniques that support mixed IR and database-oriented querying, thus bridging the gap between these three views on the data to be retrieved. Another salient characteristic of x² that distinguishes it from other visual query systems for XML is that it supports various degrees of detailedness in the presentation of answers, as well as techniques for dynamically reordering, grouping and ranking retrieved elements once the complete answer set has been computed.     

XML 关键词检索的查询理解

与纯文本文档集相比,使用语义标签标注的半结构化的XML文档集,有助于信息检索系统更好地理解待检索文档.同样,结构化查询,比如SQL,XQuery和Xpath,相对于纯关键词查询更加清晰地表达了用户的查询意图.这二者都能够帮助信息检索系统获得更好的检索精度.但关键词查询因其简单和易用性,仍被广泛使用.提出了XNodeRelation算法,以自动推断关键词查询的结构化信息(条件/目标节点类型).与已有的推断算法相比,综合了XML文档集的模式和统计信息以及查询关键词出现的上下文及其关联关系等推断用户的查询意图.大量的实验验证了该算法的有效性.     

基于贝叶斯网络的XML文档查询模型

目前XML查询语言及查询界面对Web用户过于复杂,该文描述了一种XML文档索引机制,在此基础上建立了一个通用的贝叶斯网络查询模型。用户只需在交互界面输入自然语言描述的查询,系统就能对其实现基于语义的构造,由它生成多个结构化查询;对这些查询建立贝叶斯网络,计算查询在给定文档下的概率,选择概率最大的前3个查询提交给系统执行。     

基于对抗式数据增强的深度文本检索重排序

在信息检索领域的排序任务中, 神经网络排序模型已经得到广泛使用. 神经网络排序模型对于数据的质量要求极高, 但是, 信息检索数据集通常含有较多噪音, 不能精确得到与查询不相关的文档. 为了训练一个高性能的神经网络排序模型, 获得高质量的负样本, 则至关重要. 借鉴现有方法doc2query的思想, 本文提出了深度、端到...     

多查询相关的排序支持向量机融合算法

排序学习是目前信息检索与机器学习领域研究的热点问题.现有排序学习算法在学习时把训练样本集中的所有查询及其相关文档等同对待,忽视了查询之间的差异,影响了排序模型的性能.对查询之间的差异进行描述,并在训练过程中考虑这种差异,提出一种基于有监督学习的融合多个与查询相关排序子模型的方法.该方法为每一个查询及其相关文档建立一个子排序模型,并将子排序模型的输出进行向量化表示,将多个查询相关的排序模型转化为体现查询差异的特征数据,实现多排序模型的集成.以排序支持向量机为例,在查询级和样本级建立新的损失函数作为优化目标,并利用此损失函数调节不同查询产生损失之间的权重,提出多查询相关的排序支持向量机融合算法.在文档检索和网页检索中的实验结果表明,使用多查询相关的排序支持向量机融合算法可以取得比传统排序学习模型更好的性能.     

Exploiting location information for Web search

Most Web pages contain location information, which are usually neglected by traditional search engines. Queries combining location and textual terms are called as spatial textual Web queries. Based on the fact that traditional search engines pay little attention in the location information in Web pages, in this paper we study a framework to utilize location information for Web search. The proposed framework consists of an offline stage to extract focused locations for crawled Web pages, as well as an online ranking stage to perform location-aware ranking for search results. The focused locations of a Web page refer to the most appropriate locations associated with the Web page. In the offline stage, we extract the focused locations and keywords from Web pages and map each keyword with specific focused locations, which forms a set of <keyword, location> pairs. In the second online query processing stage, we extract keywords from the query, and computer the ranking scores based on location relevance and the location-constrained scores for each querying keyword. The experiments on various real datasets crawled from nj.gov, BBC and New York Time show that the performance of our algorithm on focused location extraction is superior to previous methods and the proposed ranking algorithm has the best performance w.r.t different spatial textual queries.     

Seamlessly integrating similarity queries in SQL

Modern database applications are increasingly employing database management systems (DBMS) to store multimedia and other complex data. To adequately support the queries required to retrieve these kinds of data, the DBMS need to answer similarity queries. However, the standard structured query language (SQL) does not provide effective support for such queries. This paper proposes an extension to SQL that seamlessly integrates syntactical constructions to express similarity predicates to the existing SQL syntax and describes the implementation of a similarity retrieval engine that allows posing similarity queries using the language extension in a relational DBMS. The engine allows the evaluation of every aspect of the proposed extension, including the data definition language and data manipulation language statements, and employs metric access methods to accelerate the queries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance analysis of three text-join algorithms

When a multidatabase system contains textual database systems (i.e., information retrieval systems), queries against the global schema of the multidatabase system may contain a new type of joins-joins between attributes of textual type. Three algorithms for processing such a type of joins are presented and their I/O costs are analyzed in this paper. Since such a type of joins often involves document collections of very large size, it is very important to find efficient algorithms to process them. The three algorithms differ on whether the documents themselves or the inverted files on the documents are used to process the join. Our analysis and the simulation results indicate that the relative performance of these algorithms depends on the input document collections, system characteristics, and the input query. For each algorithm, the type of input document collections with which the algorithm is likely to perform well is identified. An integrated algorithm that automatically selects the best algorithm to use is also proposed     

Measuring ranked list robustness for query performance prediction

We introduce the notion of ranking robustness, which refers to a property of a ranked list of documents that indicates how stable the ranking is in the presence of uncertainty in the ranked documents. We propose a statistical measure called the robustness score to quantify this notion. Our initial motivation for measuring ranking robustness is to predict topic difficulty for content-based queries in the ad-hoc retrieval task. Our results demonstrate that the robustness score is positively and consistently correlation with average precision of content-based queries across a variety of TREC test collections. Though our focus is on prediction under the ad-hoc retrieval task, we observe an interesting negative correlation with query performance when our technique is applied to named-page finding queries, which are a fundamentally different kind of queries. A side effect of this different behavior of the robustness score between the two types of queries is that the robustness score is also found to be a good feature for query classification.      

基于语义的Web信息检索系统的研究

提出了对含有自由文本和丰富语义标记的网络文档资源的一种检索方法.通过对现有的三种语义检索系统原型的分析,提出了一个改进后的实现框架,在此框架中文档资源和查询都可用Web本体语言描述.这些描述提供了关于文档和其内容结构化或半结构化的信息.当这些文档被索引后执行语义查询时或者查询结果处理时,它可以对这些信息进行语义推理,从而将极大地提高检索效果.     

Semplore: A scalable IR approach to search the Web of Data

The Web of Data keeps growing rapidly. However, the full exploitation of this large amount of structured data faces numerous challenges like usability, scalability, imprecise information needs and data change. We present Semplore, an IR-based system that aims at addressing these issues. Semplore supports intuitive faceted search and complex queries both on text and structured data. It combines imprecise keyword search and precise structured query in a unified ranking scheme. Scalable query processing is supported by leveraging inverted indexes traditionally used in IR systems. This is combined with a novel block-based index structure to support efficient index update when data changes. The experimental results show that Semplore is an efficient and effective system for searching the Web of Data and can be used as a basic infrastructure for Web-scale Semantic Web search engines.     

基于CouchDB的SPARQL查询引擎实现

传统的SPARQL查询引擎在处理查询时以三元组模式为基本单位做查询优化处理,在三元组模式较多时存在着过多的连接操作,开销比较大。文中基于文档数据库的存储和查询特点,提出一种利用主语分类的方式来存储RDF数据的方法,将不同的RDF三元组按主语分成不同的类,并存入文档数据库的文档中。在处理SPARQL查询时将三元组模式也按照主语分类,构成以主语相关块为单位的查询图,并提出一种基于属性相关性的选择度估计方法来优化查询执行计划。文中利用文档数据库CouchDB实现了新的SPARQL查询引擎,实验证明文中的方法能够提高SPARQL基本图模式查询的效率。     

Crawling ranked deep Web data sources

In the era of big data, the vast majority of the data are not from the surface Web, the Web that is interconnected by hyperlinks and indexed by most general purpose search engines. Instead, the trove of valuable data often reside in the deep Web, the Web that is hidden behind query interfaces. Since numerous applications, like data integration and vertical portals, require deep Web data, various crawling methods were developed for exhaustively harvesting a deep Web data source with the minimal (or near-minimal) cost. Most existing crawling methods assume that all the documents matched by queries are returned. In practice, data sources often return the top k matches. This makes exhaustive data harvesting difficult: highly ranked documents will be returned multiple times, while documents ranked low have small chance being returned. In this paper, we decompose this problem into two orthogonal sub-problems, i.e., query and ranking bias problems, and propose a document frequency based crawling method to overcome the ranking bias problem. The rational of our method is to use the queries whose document frequencies are within the specified range to avoid the effect of search ranking plus return limit and significantly reduce the difficulty of crawling ranked data source. The method is extensively tested on a variety of datasets and compared with two existing methods. The experimental result demonstrates that our method outperforms the two algorithms by 58 % and 90 % on average respectively.     

The RDF-3X engine for scalable management of RDF data

RDF is a data model for schema-free structured information that is gaining momentum in the context of Semantic-Web data, life sciences, and also Web 2.0 platforms. The “pay-as-you-go” nature of RDF and the flexible pattern-matching capabilities of its query language SPARQL entail efficiency and scalability challenges for complex queries including long join paths. This paper presents the RDF-3X engine, an implementation of SPARQL that achieves excellent performance by pursuing a RISC-style architecture with streamlined indexing and query processing. The physical design is identical for all RDF-3X databases regardless of their workloads, and completely eliminates the need for index tuning by exhaustive indexes for all permutations of subject-property-object triples and their binary and unary projections. These indexes are highly compressed, and the query processor can aggressively leverage fast merge joins with excellent performance of processor caches. The query optimizer is able to choose optimal join orders even for complex queries, with a cost model that includes statistical synopses for entire join paths. Although RDF-3X is optimized for queries, it also provides good support for efficient online updates by means of a staging architecture: direct updates to the main database indexes are deferred, and instead applied to compact differential indexes which are later merged into the main indexes in a batched manner. Experimental studies with several large-scale datasets with more than 50 million RDF triples and benchmark queries that include pattern matching, manyway star-joins, and long path-joins demonstrate that RDF-3X can outperform the previously best alternatives by one or two orders of magnitude.     

Supporting top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">join</Emphasis> queries in relational databases

Ranking queries, also known as top-k queries, produce results that are ordered on some computed score. Typically, these queries involve joins, where users are usually interested only in the top-k join results. Top-k queries are dominant in many emerging applications, e.g., multimedia retrieval by content, Web databases, data mining, middlewares, and most information retrieval applications. Current relational query processors do not handle ranking queries efficiently, especially when joins are involved. In this paper, we address supporting top-k join queries in relational query processors. We introduce a new rank-join algorithm that makes use of the individual orders of its inputs to produce join results ordered on a user-specified scoring function. The idea is to rank the join results progressively during the join operation. We introduce two physical query operators based on variants of ripple join that implement the rank-join algorithm. The operators are nonblocking and can be integrated into pipelined execution plans. We also propose an efficient heuristic designed to optimize a top-k join query by choosing the best join order. We address several practical issues and optimization heuristics to integrate the new join operators in practical query processors. We implement the new operators inside a prototype database engine based on PREDATOR. The experimental evaluation of our approach compares recent algorithms for joining ranked inputs and shows superior performance.Received: 23 December 2003, Accepted: 31 March 2004, Published online: 12 August 2004Edited by: S. AbiteboulExtended version of the paper published in the Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Very Large Databases, VLDB 2003, Berlin, Germany, pp 754-765     

An evolutionary approach for combining different sources of evidence in search engines

Modern Web search engines use different strategies to improve the overall quality of their document rankings. Usually the strategy adopted involves the combination of multiple sources of relevance into a single ranking. This work proposes the use of evolutionary techniques to derive good evidence combination functions using three different sources of evidence of relevance: the textual content of documents, the reputation of documents extracted from the connectivity information available in the processed collection and the anchor text concatenation. The combination functions discovered by our evolutionary strategies were tested using a collection containing 368 queries extracted from a real nation-wide search engine query log with over 12 million documents. The experiments performed indicate that our proposal is an effective and practical alternative for combining sources of evidence into a single ranking. We also show that different types of queries submitted to a search engine can require different combination functions and that our proposal is useful for coping with such differences.     

混合P2P环境下有效的查询扩展及其搜索算法

查询扩展是解决信息获取领域中用词歧义性问题的关键技术,并被广泛应用于搜索引擎中,获得了巨大的成功.然而,由于P2P(peer-to-peer)系统是一个分散的、动态的系统,在P2P环境下进行有效的查询扩展具有一定的挑战性.首先,利用查询与文档的关联关系构建了LEM(local expansion method)查询扩展方法;然后,基于查询与文档用词的直接关联,提出了HEM(history_based expansion method)查询扩展方法.在此基础上,提出了一种基于查询扩展的混合P2P环境下的搜索算法.实验及分析结果表明,查询扩展及其搜索算法能够极大地提高搜索的效果.     

Integrated Video and Text for Content-based Access to Video Databases

This paper introduces a new approach to realize video databases. The approach consists of a VideoText data model based on free text annotations associated with logical video segments and a corresponding query language. Traditional database techniques are inadequate for exploiting queries on unstructured data such as video, supporting temporal queries, and ranking query results according to their relevance to the query. In this paper, we propose to use information retrieval techniques to provide such features and to extend the query language to accommodate interval queries that are particularly suited to video data. Algorithms are provided to show how user queries are evaluated. Finally, a generic and modular video database architecture which is based on VideoText data model is described.