An overview of semantic search evaluation initiatives

Recent work on searching the Semantic Web has yielded a wide range of approaches with respect to the underlying search mechanisms, results management and presentation, and style of input. Each approach impacts upon the quality of the information retrieved and the user’s experience of the search process. However, despite the wealth of experience accumulated from evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems, the evaluation of Semantic Web search systems has largely been developed in isolation from mainstream IR evaluation with a far less unified approach to the design of evaluation activities. This has led to slow progress and low interest when compared to other established evaluation series, such as TREC for IR or OAEI for Ontology Matching. In this paper, we review existing approaches to IR evaluation and analyse evaluation activities for Semantic Web search systems. Through a discussion of these, we identify their weaknesses and highlight the future need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework that addresses current limitations.     

An evaluation of semantic fisheye views for opportunistic search in an annotated image collection

Visual interfaces are potentially powerful tools for users to explore a representation of a collection and opportunistically discover information that will guide them toward relevant documents. Semantic fisheye views (SFEVs) are focus + context visualization techniques that manage visual complexity by selectively emphasizing and increasing the detail of information related to the users focus and deemphasizing or filtering less important information.In this paper we describe a prototype for visualizing an annotated image collection and an experiment to compare the effectiveness of two distinctly different SFEVs for a complex opportunistic search task. The first SFEV calculates relevance based on keyword-content similarity and the second based on conceptual relationships between images derived using WordNet. The results of the experiment suggest that semantic-guided search is significantly more effective than similarity-guided search for discovering and using domain knowledge in a collection.     

基于语义分析的垂直搜索网络蜘蛛

通用搜索引擎数据量庞大,但查询结果不够准确.分类目录正好相反.为了综合两者优势,对垂直搜索引擎进行了研究和分析.着重研究了垂直搜索引擎的核心模块--智能网络搜索蜘蛛.提出了搜索分析的新概念--规则.研究了蜘蛛中定义支持同义词的语义词典的方法,给出了按照规则分析和检索的实现方法和流程.程序需要定义多种规则,让蜘蛛依照规则进行网页爬行和信息采集.最后给出一个项目实例,证明了上述方法的可行性.     

基于Lucene的语义检索系统的设计和实现

研究了语义检索,以Lucene为主要索引引擎,组合其它索引引擎,结合同义词查询扩展的概念,设计了一个语义检索系统,详细地描述了系统的实现过程.分析了语义检索的特点,从同义词扩展的角度,丰富和扩展了查询语义,查询扩展模块被很好的整合到以Lucene为基础的检索系统中,该系统在实验中表现了良好的效果.     

基于文献信息网络语义特征的相似性搜索

文献信息网络是典型的异构信息网络,基于其进行相似性搜索是图挖掘领域的一个研究热点。然而,现有的方法主要采用元路径或元结构的方式,并未考虑节点自身的语义特征,从而导致搜索结果出现偏差。对此,基于文献信息网络提出了一种基于向量的语义特征提取方法,并设计实现了基于向量的节点相似性计算方法VSim;此外,结合元路径设计了基于语义特征的相似性搜索算法VPSim;为提高算法的执行效率,针对文献网络数据的特点,设计了剪枝策略。通过在真实数据上的实验,验证了VSim对搜索语义特征相似实体的适用性,以及VPSim算法的有效性、高执行效率和高可扩展性。     

DanVideo: an MPEG-7 authoring and retrieval system for dance videos

A well-annotated dance media is an essential part of a nation’s identity, transcending cultural and language barriers. Many dance video archives suffer from problems concerning authoring and access, because of the complex spatio-temporal relationships that exist between the dancers in terms of movements of their body parts and the emotions expressed by them in a dance. This paper presents a system named DanVideo for semi-automatic authoring and access to dance archives. DanVideo provides methods of annotation and authoring and retrieval tools for choreographers, dancers, and students. We demonstrate how dance media can be semantically annotated and how this information can be used for the retrieval of the dance video semantics. In particular, DanVideo offers an MPEG-7 based semi-automatic authoring tool that takes dance video annotations generated by dance experts and produces MPEG-7 metadata. DanVideo also has a search engine that takes users’ queries and retrieves dance semantics from metadata arranged using tree-embedding technique and based on spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal features of dancers. The search engine also leverages a domain-specific ontology to process knowledge-based queries. We have assessed the dance-video queries and semantic annotations in terms of precision, recall, and fidelity.     

基于ARM7的MPEG-4视频解码器的优化

分析了ARM7处理器的结构特点,针对解码器的优化特点和芯片的硬件结构,采用了算法级、语言级、ARM级联合优化的方法,对标准MPEG-4解码过程进行了优化。通过本文所总结的ARM7TDMI上视频解码的优化方法,可以使MPEG4视频解码节约大量的数据处理时间,能较好地满足低分辨率、低帧率场合实时解码的要求。     

A game approach to optimization of bandwidth allocation using MPEG-7 and MPEG-21

Resource allocation aims at optimizing the usage of shared resources and maximizing the end-user experience by determining the optimum sharing of resources and choosing whom to serve, how and when. Approaches addressing this challenge are driven by the requirements of the environment and the characteristics of users. This paper addresses the challenge of optimising resource allocation through the combined application of game theory and normative tools such MPEG-21 and MPEG-7. The resulting game play leads to a forced Nash equilibrium where a change of strategy will not make any player better off.     

Patterns of semantic relations to improve image content search

This paper reports on a study to explore how semantic relations can be used to expand a query for objects in an image. The study is part of a project with the overall objective to provide semantic annotation and search facilities for a virtual collection of art resources. In this study we used semantic relations from WordNet for 15 image content queries. The results show that, next to the hyponym/hypernym relation, the meronym/holonym (part-of) relation is particularly useful in query expansion. We identified a number of relation patterns that improve recall without jeopardising precision.     

Using semantic components to search for domain-specific documents: An evaluation from the system perspective and the user perspective

We seek to leverage an expert user's knowledge about how information is organized in a domain and how information is presented in typical documents within a particular domain-specific collection, to effectively and efficiently meet the expert's targeted information needs. We have developed the semantic components model to describe important semantic content within documents. The semantic components model for a given collection (based on a general understanding of the type of information needs expected) consists of a set of document classes, where each class has an associated set of semantic components. Each semantic component instance consists of segments of text about a particular aspect of the main topic of the document and may not correspond to structural elements in the document. The semantic components model represents document content in a manner that is complementary to full text and keyword indexing. This paper describes how the semantic components model can be used to improve an information retrieval system. We present experimental evidence from a large interactive searching study that compared the use of semantic components in a system with full text and keyword indexing, where we extended the query language to allow users to search using semantic components, to a base system that did not have semantic components. We evaluate the systems from a system perspective, where semantic components were shown to improve document ranking for precision-oriented searches, and from a user perspective. We also evaluate the systems from a session-based perspective, evaluating not only the results of individual queries but also the results of multiple queries during a single interactive query session.     

综合MPEG-7全局及局部主颜色的图像检索方法*

为改进全局主颜色特征在反映空间分布信息方面的不足,提出一种基于局部主颜色特征的图像检索方法,并综合两者的特点提出一种基于MPEG-7全局及局部主颜色描述符的图像检索方法。给出了全局主颜色和局部主颜色的提取方法,详细介绍了MPEG-7标准的颜色评价准则,并以此作为评判检索结果优劣的依据。实验结果表明,综合利用两种特征对图像进行描述及检索,获得了比使用单一特征更好的检索效果。     

Relevance feedback for category search in music retrieval based on semantic concept learning

Traditional content-based music retrieval systems retrieve a specific music object which is similar to what a user has requested. However, the need exists for the development of category search for the retrieval of a specific category of music objects which share a common semantic concept. The concept of category search in content-based music retrieval is subjective and dynamic. Therefore, this paper investigates a relevance feedback mechanism for category search of polyphonic symbolic music based on semantic concept learning. For the consideration of both global and local properties of music objects, a segment-based music object modeling approach is presented. Furthermore, in order to discover the user semantic concept in terms of discriminative features of discriminative segments, a concept learning mechanism based on data mining techniques is proposed to find the discriminative characteristics between relevant and irrelevant objects. Moreover, three strategies, the Most-Positive, the Most-Informative, and the Hybrid, to return music objects concerning user relevance judgments are investigated. Finally, comparative experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed relevance feedback mechanism. Experimental results show that, for a database of 215 polyphonic music objects, 60% average precision can be achieved through the use of the proposed relevance feedback mechanism.

一个MPEG-7搜索引擎的设计、实现和评估

MPEG-7处理链包括特征提取,描述本身和搜索引擎。目前MPEG-7方面的研究多集中于标准化部分和特征抽取,很少有人研究MPEG-7的搜索引擎。论文描述了一个基于MPEG-7的E-Learning领域视频语义摘要框架“SearchIt”的MPEG-7搜索引擎,它是一个智能的、使用原生XML数据库和XQL的分布式元数据搜索引擎。     

Evaluation of semantic similarity metrics applied to the automatic retrieval of medical documents: An UMLS approach

One promise of current information retrieval systems is the capability to identify risk groups for certain diseases and pathologies based on the automatic analysis of vast amounts of Electronic Medical Records repositories. However, the complexity and the degree of specialization of the language used by the experts in this context, make this task both challenging and complex. In this work, we introduce a novel experimental study to evaluate the performance of the two semantic similarity metrics (Path and Intrinsic IC-Path, both widely accepted in the literature) in a real-life information retrieval situation. In order to achieve this goal and due to the lack of methodologies for this context in the literature, we propose a straightforward information retrieval system for the biomedical field based on the UMLS Metathesaurus and on semantic similarity metrics. In contrast with previous studies which focus on testbeds with limited and controlled sets of concepts, we use a large amount of information (101,712 medical documents extracted from TREC Medical Records Track 2011). Our results show that in real-life cases, both metrics display similar performance, Path (F-Measure = 0.430) e Intrinsic IC-Path (F-Measure = 0.427). Thereby we suggest that the use of Intrinsic IC-Path is not justified in real scenarios.