Scenario-based query processing for video-surveillance archives

Automated video surveillance has emerged as a trendy application domain in recent years, and accessing the semantic content of surveillance video has become a challenging research area. The results of a considerable amount of research dealing with automated access to video surveillance have appeared in the literature; however, significant semantic gaps in event models and content-based access to surveillance video remain. In this paper, we propose a scenario-based query-processing system for video surveillance archives. In our system, a scenario is specified as a sequence of event predicates that can be enriched with object-based low-level features and directional predicates. We introduce an inverted tracking scheme, which effectively tracks the moving objects and enables view-based addressing of the scene. Our query-processing system also supports inverse querying and view-based querying, for after-the-fact activity analysis. We propose a specific surveillance query language to express the supported query types in a scenario-based manner. We also present a visual query-specification interface devised to facilitate the query-specification process. We have conducted performance experiments to show that our query-processing technique has a high expressive power and satisfactory retrieval accuracy in video surveillance.     

一种个性化查询扩展方法

针对当前主流web搜索引擎存在信息检索个性化效果差和信息检索的精确率低等缺点, 通过对已有方法的技术改进, 介绍了一种基于用户历史兴趣网页和历史查询词相结合的个性化查询扩展方法。当用户在搜索引擎上输入查询词时,能根据学习到的当前用户兴趣模型动态判定用户潜在兴趣和计算词间相关度,并将恰当的扩展查询词组提交给搜索引擎,从而实现不同用户输入同一查询词能返回不同检索结果的目的。实验验证了算法的有效性,检索精确率也比原方法有明显提高。     

HQE: A hybrid method for query expansion

Query expansion methods have been extensively studied in information retrieval. This paper proposes a query expansion method. The HQE method employs a combination of ontology-based collaborative filtering and neural networks to improve query expansion. In the HQE method, ontology-based collaborative filtering is used to analyze semantic relationships in order to find the similar users, and the radial basis function (RBF) networks are used to acquire the most relevant web documents and their corresponding terms from these similar users’ queries. The method can improve the precision and only requires users to provide less query information at the beginning than traditional collaborative filtering methods.     

Leveraging semantic resources in diversified query expansion

A search query, being a very concise grounding of user intent, could potentially have many possible interpretations. Search engines hedge their bets by diversifying top results to cover multiple such possibilities so that the user is likely to be satisfied, whatever be her intended interpretation. Diversified Query Expansion is the problem of diversifying query expansion suggestions, so that the user can specialize the query to better suit her intent, even before perusing search results. In this paper, we consider the usage of semantic resources and tools to arrive at improved methods for diversified query expansion. In particular, we develop two methods, those that leverage Wikipedia and pre-learnt distributional word embeddings respectively. Both the approaches operate on a common three-phase framework; that of first taking a set of informative terms from the search results of the initial query, then building a graph, following by using a diversity-conscious node ranking to prioritize candidate terms for diversified query expansion. Our methods differ in the second phase, with the first method Select-Link-Rank (SLR) linking terms with Wikipedia entities to accomplish graph construction; on the other hand, our second method, Select-Embed-Rank (SER), constructs the graph using similarities between distributional word embeddings. Through an empirical analysis and user study, we show that SLR ourperforms state-of-the-art diversified query expansion methods, thus establishing that Wikipedia is an effective resource to aid diversified query expansion. Our empirical analysis also illustrates that SER outperforms the baselines convincingly, asserting that it is the best available method for those cases where SLR is not applicable; these include narrow-focus search systems where a relevant knowledge base is unavailable. Our SLR method is also seen to outperform a state-of-the-art method in the task of diversified entity ranking.     

基于查询扩展的人名消歧

针对现有很多基于特征的人名消歧方法不适用于文档本身特征稀疏的问题,提出一种借助丰富的互联网资源,使用搜索引擎查询并扩展出更多与文档相关特征的方法。首先根据搜索引擎的特性构建了四类查询规则,然后通过这些查询规则进行搜索并返回前k个文档,最后对这些文档使用文档频率(DF)方法进行特征选择,并将选择的特征加入到原文档中。实验证明,该方法能显著提高人名消歧系统的性能,平均F值由76%增加到81%。     

A personalized query expansion approach for engineering document retrieval

Engineers create engineering documents with their own terminologies, and want to search existing engineering documents quickly and accurately during a product development process. Keyword-based search methods have been widely used due to their ease of use, but their search accuracy has been often problematic because of the semantic ambiguity of terminologies in engineering documents and queries. The semantic ambiguity can be alleviated by using a domain ontology. Also, if queries are expanded to incorporate the engineer’s personalized information needs, the accuracy of the search result would be improved. Therefore, we propose a framework to search engineering documents with less semantic ambiguity and more focus on each engineer’s personalized information needs. The framework includes four processes: (1) developing a domain ontology, (2) indexing engineering documents, (3) learning user profiles, and (4) performing personalized query expansion and retrieval. A domain ontology is developed based on product structure information and engineering documents. Using the domain ontology, terminologies in documents are disambiguated and indexed. Also, a user profile is generated from the domain ontology. By user profile learning, user’s interests are captured from the relevant documents. During a personalized query expansion process, the learned user profile is used to reflect user’s interests. Simultaneously, user’s searching intent, which is implicitly inferred from the user’s task context, is also considered. To retrieve relevant documents, an expanded query in which both user’s interests and intents are reflected is then matched against the document collection. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can substantially outperform both the keyword-based approach and the existing query expansion method in retrieving engineering documents. Reflecting a user’s information needs precisely has been identified to be the most important factor underlying this notable improvement.     

基于语义的概念查询扩展

针对当前信息检索系统中所存在查准率低和查全率低的情况,分析了当前检索系统中常用的方法后,提出了一种基于语义的概念查询扩展方法.该方法结合概念语义空间来实现用户检索的概念查询扩展,以达到提高查准率和查全率的目的.实验结果表明,该方法相对于传统方法可以大幅提高用户检索的查准率和查全率.     

An evolutionary game theory based approach for query expansion

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In Information Retrieval (IR) Systems, an essential technique employed to improve accuracy and efficiency is Query Expansion (QE). QE is the technique that...     

Supporting web query expansion efficiently using multi-granularity indexing and query processing

The problem of word mismatch in information retrieval (IR) occurs because users often use different words to describe concepts in their queries than authors use to describe the same concepts in their documents. Query expansion is used to deal with the mismatch between author and user vocabularies. To support query expansion, indices on words related by lexical semantics and syntactical co-occurrence need to be maintained. Two issues become paramount in supporting query expansion: the size of index tables and the query processing overhead. In this paper, we propose to use the notion of multi-granularity for more efficient indexing and query processing while the same degrees of precision and recall are maintained. We also describes extensions of this technique to handle: (1) query relaxation to handle words with multiple senses and with other semantic relationships; (2) progressive processing of queries with top N results and (3) progressive processing of queries with specification of the importance of each keyword.     

Pseudo-relevance feedback and statistical query expansion for web snippet generation

A (page or web) snippet is a document excerpt allowing a user to understand if a document is indeed relevant without accessing it. This paper proposes an effective snippet generation method. A statistical query expansion approach with pseudo-relevance feedback and text summarization techniques are applied to salient sentence extraction for good quality snippets. In the experimental results, the proposed method showed much better performance than other methods including those of commercial Web search engines such as Google and Naver.     

Combining query-by-example and query expansion for simplifying web service discovery

The vision of a worldwide computing network of services that Service Oriented Computing paradigm and its most popular materialization, namely Web Service technologies, promote is a victim of its own success. As the number of publicly available services grows, discovering proper services is similar to finding a needle in a haystack. Different approaches aim at making discovery more accurate and even automatic. However they impose heavy modifications over current Web Service infrastructures and require developers to invest much effort into publishing and describing their services and needs. So far, the acceptance of this paradigm is mainly limited by the high costs associated with connecting service providers and consumers. This paper presents WSQBE+, an approach to make Web Service publication and discovery easier. WSQBE+ combines open standards and popular best practices for using external Web services with text-mining and machine learning techniques. We describe our approach and empirically evaluate it in terms of retrieval effectiveness and processing time, by using a data-set of 391 public services.     

基于主题的个性化查询扩展模型

针对"多义词"和"词典问题",结合文本分析和用户行为分析,提出了一种基于主题的个性化查询扩展模型.分析文本时,结合关联规则和图排序算法构建TextRank模型,脱离了对人工词典的依赖,并用此模型提取多文本主题;在用户行为分析上,使用移动时间窗口法建立用户模型,有效地捕获了当前的查询主题.查询扩展时,匹配用户主题与文本主题,选择相应的关联规则进行扩展.对结合关联规则与图排序的主题提取进行了实验,并将基于主题的查询扩展模型与其它查询扩展模型进行了比较.     

A query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy

In this paper we propose a query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy, storing and classifying the tags used to label a set of available resources. Our approach builds and maintains a profile for each user. When he submits a query (consisting of a set of tags) on this folksonomy to retrieve a set of resources of his interest, it automatically finds further “authoritative” tags to enrich his query and proposes them to him. All “authoritative” tags considered interesting by the user are exploited to refine his query and, along with those tags directly specified by him, are stored in his profile in such a way to enrich it. The expansion of user queries and the enrichment of user profiles allow any content-based recommender system operating on the folksonomy to retrieve and suggest a high number of resources matching with user needs and desires. Moreover, enriched user profiles can guide any collaborative filtering recommender system to proactively discover and suggest to a user many resources relevant to him, even if he has not explicitly searched for them.     

Deep learning the semantics of change sequences for query expansion

The overexpansion problem negatively affects the quality of query expansion. To improve the quality of queries for searching code, this paper proposed a DBN-based algorithm for effective query expansion. The deep belief network (DBN) model is trained on the code sequences and their change sequences, which aims to capture the meaningful terms during the evolution of source code. In contrast to previous studies, the proposed model not only extracts relevant terms to expand a query but also excludes irrelevant terms from the query. It addresses two problems in query expansion, including the overexpansion of the original query and the negative influence of the changed terms in the target source code. Experiments on both artificial queries and real queries show that the proposed algorithm outperforms several query expansion algorithms for code search.     

Efficient query expansion with auxiliary data structures

Query expansion is a well-known method for improving average effectiveness in information retrieval. The most effective query expansion methods rely on retrieving documents which are used as a source of expansion terms. Retrieving those documents is costly. We examine the bottlenecks of a conventional approach and investigate alternative methods aimed at reducing query evaluation time. We propose a new method that draws candidate terms from brief document summaries that are held in memory for each document. While approximately maintaining the effectiveness of the conventional approach, this method significantly reduces the time required for query expansion by a factor of 5–10.     

.基于用户查询扩展的自动摘要技术*

提出了一种新的文档自动摘要方法,利用非负矩阵分解算法将原始文档表示为若干语义特征向量的线性组合,通过相似性计算来确定与用户查询高度相关的语义特征向量,抽取在该向量上具有较大投影系数的句子作为摘要,在此过程中,多次采用相关反馈技术对用户查询进行扩展优化。实验表明,该方法所得摘要在突出文档主题的同时,体现了用户的需求和兴趣,有效改善了信息检索的效率。     

Multi-domain collaborative exploration mechanisms for query expansion in an agent-based filtering framework

Novice users often do not have enough domain knowledge to create good queries for searching information on-line. To help alleviate the situation, exploration techniques have been used to increase the diversity of the search results so that not only those explicitly asked will be returned, but also those potentially relevant ones will be returned too. Most existing approaches, such as collaborative filtering, do not allow the level of exploration to be controlled. Consequently, the search results can be very different from what is expected. We propose an exploration strategy that performs intelligent query processing by first searching usable old queries, and then utilising them to adapt the current query, with the hope that the adapted query will be more relevant to the user’s areas of interest. We applied the proposed strategy to the implementation of a personal information assistant (PIA) set up for user evaluation for 3 months. The experimental results showed that the proposed exploration method outperformed collaborative filtering, and mutation and crossover methods by around 25% in terms of the elimination of off-topic results.     

Multi-domain collaborative exploration mechanisms for query expansion in an agent-based filtering framework

Novice users often do not have enough domain knowledge to create good queries for searching information on-line. To help alleviate the situation, exploration techniques have been used to increase the diversity of the search results so that not only those explicitly asked will be returned, but also those potentially relevant ones will be returned too. Most existing approaches, such as collaborative filtering, do not allow the level of exploration to be controlled. Consequently, the search results can be very different from what is expected. We propose an exploration strategy that performs intelligent query processing by first searching usable old queries, and then utilising them to adapt the current query, with the hope that the adapted query will be more relevant to the user’s areas of interest. We applied the proposed strategy to the implementation of a personal information assistant (PIA) set up for user evaluation for 3 months. The experimental results showed that the proposed exploration method outperformed collaborative filtering, and mutation and crossover methods by around 25% in terms of the elimination of off-topic results.     

A practical ontology query expansion algorithm for semantic-aware learning objects retrieval

Following the rapid development of Internet, particularly web page interaction technology, distant e-learning has become increasingly realistic and popular. To solve the problems associated with sharing and reusing teaching materials in different e-learning systems, several standard formats, including SCORM, IMS, LOM, and AICC, etc., recently have been proposed by several different international organizations. SCORM LOM, namely learning object metadata, facilitates the indexing and searching of learning objects in a learning object repository through extended sharing and searching features. However, LOM suffers a weakness in terms of semantic-awareness capability. Most information retrieval systems assume that users have cognitive ability regarding their needs. However, in e-learning systems, users may have no idea of what they are looking for and the learning object metadata. This study presents an ontological approach for semantic-aware learning object retrieval. This approach has two significant novel features: a fully automatic ontology-based query expansion algorithm for inferring and aggregating user intention based on their original short query, and another “ambiguity removal” procedure for correcting inappropriate user query terms. This approach is sufficiently generic to be embedded to other LOM-based search mechanisms for semantic-aware learning object retrieval.Focused on digital learning material and contrasted to other traditional keyword-based search technologies, the proposed approach has experimentally demonstrated significantly improved retrieval precision and recall rate.