Context-Dependent Term Relations for Information Retrieval.pptVIP

Université de Montréal Towards Information Retrieval with More Inferential Power Jian-Yun Nie Department of Computer Science University of Montreal nie@iro.umontreal.ca Background IR Goal: Retrieve relevant information from a large collection of documents to satisfy user’s information need Traditional relevance: Query Q and document D in a given corpus: Score (Q,D) User-independent Knowledge independent Independent of all contextual factors Expected relevance: Also depends on users (U) and contexts (C): Score (Q,D,U,C) Reasoning with contextual information Several approaches in IR can be viewed as simple inference We have to consider more complex inference Overview Introduction: Current Approaches to IR Inference using terms relations A General Model to Integrate Contextual Factors Constructing and Using Domain Models Conclusion and Future Work Traditional Methods in IR Each query term t matches a list of documents t: {…, D, …} Final answer list = combining all the lists of query terms e.g. Vector space model: Language model: 2 implicit assumptions: Information need is only specified by the query terms Query terms are independent Reality A term is only one of the possible expression of a meaning Synonyms, related terms Query is only a partial specification of user’s information need Many words can be omitted in the query: e.g. “Java hotel”: hotel booking in Java island, … How to make the query more complete? Dealing with relations between terms Previous methods try to enhance the query: Query expansion (add some related terms) Thesauri: Wordnet, Hownet Statistical co-occurrence: 2 terms that often co-occur together in the same context Pseudo relevance feedback: top-ranked documents retrieved with original query User profile, background, preference… (a set of background terms) Used to re-rank the documents Equivalent to a query expansion Question Are these related to inference? How to perform inference in general in IR? LM as