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Contextual information retrieval (CIR) is a critical technique for today’s search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. Despite its importance, little progress has been made in its application, due to the difficulty of capturing and representing contextual information about users. This thesis details the development and evaluation of the contextual SERL search, designed to tackle some of the challenges associated with CIR from the World Wide Web. The contextual SERL search utilises a rich contextual model that exploits implicit and explicit data to modify queries to more accurately reflect the user’s interests as well as to continually build the user’s contextual profile and a shared contextual knowledge base. These profiles are used to filter results from a standard search engine to improve the relevance of the pages displayed to the user. The contextual SERL search has been tested in an observational study that has captured both qualitative and quantitative data about the ability of the framework to improve the user’s web search experience. A total of 30 subjects, with different levels of search experience, participated in the observational study experiment. The results demonstrate that when the contextual profile and the shared contextual knowledge base are used, the contextual SERL search improves search effectiveness, efficiency and subjective satisfaction. The effectiveness improves as subjects have actually entered fewer queries to reach the target information in comparison to the contemporary search engine. In the case of a particularly complex search task, the efficiency improves as subjects have browsed fewer hits, visited fewer URLs, made fewer clicks and have taken less time to reach the target information when compared to the contemporary search engine. Finally, subjects have expressed a higher degree of satisfaction on the quality of contextual support when using the shared contextual knowledge base in comparison to using their contextual profile. These results suggest that integration of a user’s contextual factors and information seeking behaviours are very important for successful development of the CIR framework. It is believed that this framework and other similar projects will help provide the basis for the next generation of contextual information retrieval from the Web.

Contextual information retrieval (CIR) is a critical technique for today’s search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. Despite its importance, little progress has been made in its application, due to the difficulty of capturing and representing contextual information about users. This thesis details the development and evaluation of the contextual SERL search, designed to tackle some of the challenges associated with CIR from the World Wide Web. The contextual SERL search utilises a rich contextual model that exploits implicit and explicit data to modify queries to more accurately reflect the user’s interests as well as to continually build the user’s contextual profile and a shared contextual knowledge base. These profiles are used to filter results from a standard search engine to improve the relevance of the pages displayed to the user. The contextual SERL search has been tested in an observational study that has captured both qualitative and quantitative data about the ability of the framework to improve the user’s web search experience. A total of 30 subjects, with different levels of search experience, participated in the observational study experiment. The results demonstrate that when the contextual profile and the shared contextual knowledge base are used, the contextual SERL search improves search effectiveness, efficiency and subjective satisfaction. The effectiveness improves as subjects have actually entered fewer queries to reach the target information in comparison to the contemporary search engine. In the case of a particularly complex search task, the efficiency improves as subjects have browsed fewer hits, visited fewer URLs, made fewer clicks and have taken less time to reach the target information when compared to the contemporary search engine. Finally, subjects have expressed a higher degree of satisfaction on the quality of contextual support when using the shared contextual knowledge base in comparison to using their contextual profile. These results suggest that integration of a user’s contextual factors and information seeking behaviours are very important for successful development of the CIR framework. It is believed that this framework and other similar projects will help provide the basis for the next generation of contextual information retrieval from the Web.

The amount of data is continually growing and the ability to efficiently search through vast amounts of data is almost always sought after. To efficiently find data in a set there exist many technologies and methods but all of them cost in the form of resources like cpu-cycles, memory and storage. In this study a search engine (SE) is optimized using several methods and techniques. Thesis looks into how to optimize a SE that is based on an external revision database.The optimized implementation is compared to a non-optimized implementation when executing a query. An artificial neural network (ANN) trained on a dataset containing 3 years normal usage at a company is used to prioritize within the resultset before returning the result to the caller. The new indexing algorithms have improved the document space complexity by removing all duplicate documents that add no value. Machine learning (ML) has been used to analyze the user behaviour to reduce the necessary amount of documents that gets retrieved by a query.

Current information retrieval models are optimized for retrieval with short keyword queries. In contrast, in this dissertation we focus on longer, verbose queries with more complex structure that are becoming more common in both mobile and web search. To this end, we propose an expressive query representation formalism based on query hypergraphs. Unlike the existing query representations, query hypergraphs model the dependencies between arbitrary concepts in the query, rather than dependencies between single query terms. Query hypergraphs are parameterized by importance weights, which are assigned to concepts and concept dependencies in the query hypergraph, based on their contribution to the overall retrieval effectiveness. Query hypergraphs are not limited to modeling the explicit query structure. Accordingly, we develop two methods for query expansion using query hypergraphs. In these methods, the expansion concepts in the query hypergraph may come either from the retrieval corpus alone or from a combination of multiple information sources such as Wikipedia or the anchor text extracted from a large-scale web corpus. We empirically demonstrate that query hypergraphs are consistently and significantly more effective than many of the current state-of-the-art retrieval methods, as demonstrated by the experiments on newswire and web corpora. Query hypergraphs improve the retrieval performance for all query types, and, in particular, they exhibit the highest effectiveness gains for verbose queries.

Desde o seu nascimento, a Ciência da Informação vem estudando métodos para o tratamento automático da informação. Esta pesquisa centrou-se na Recuperação de Informação, área que envolve a aplicação de métodos computacionais no tratamento e recuperação da informação, para avaliar em que medida a Ciência da Computação contribui para o avanço da Ciência da Informação. Inicialmente a Recuperação de Informação é contextualizada no corpo interdisciplinar da Ciência da Informação e são apresentados os elementos básicos do processo de recuperação de informação. Os modelos computacionais de recuperação de informação são analisados a partir da categorização em “quantitativos" e “dinâmicos". Algumas técnicas de processamento da linguagem natural utilizadas na recuperação de informação são igualmente discutidas. No contexto atual da Web são apresentadas as técnicas de representação e recuperação da informação desde os mecanismos de busca até a Web Semântica. Conclui-se que, apesar da inquestionável importância dos métodos e técnicas computacionais no tratamento da informação, estas se configuram apenas como ferramentas auxiliares, pois utilizam uma conceituação de “informação" extremamente restrita em relação àquela utilizada pela Ciência da Informação / Since its birth, Information Science has been studying methods for the automatic treatment of information. This research has focused on Information Retrieval, an area that involves the application of computational methods in the treatment and retrieval of information, in order to assess how Computer Science contributes to the progress of Information Science. Initially, Information Retrieval is contextualized in the interdisciplinary body of Information Science and, after that, the basic elements of the information retrieval process are presented. Computational models related to information retrieval are analyzed according to "quantitative" and "dynamic" categories. Some natural language processing techniques used in information retrieval are equally discussed. In the current context of the Web, the techniques of information retrieval are presented, from search engines to the Semantic Web. It can be concluded that in spite of the unquestionable importance of the computational methods and techniques for dealing with information, they are regarded only as auxiliary tools, because their concept of "information" is extremely restrict in relation to that used by the Information Science.

Desde o seu nascimento, a Ciência da Informação vem estudando métodos para o tratamento automático da informação. Esta pesquisa centrou-se na Recuperação de Informação, área que envolve a aplicação de métodos computacionais no tratamento e recuperação da informação, para avaliar em que medida a Ciência da Computação contribui para o avanço da Ciência da Informação. Inicialmente a Recuperação de Informação é contextualizada no corpo interdisciplinar da Ciência da Informação e são apresentados os elementos básicos do processo de recuperação de informação. Os modelos computacionais de recuperação de informação são analisados a partir da categorização em “quantitativos” e “dinâmicos”. Algumas técnicas de processamento da linguagem natural utilizadas na recuperação de informação são igualmente discutidas. No contexto atual da Web são apresentadas as técnicas de representação e recuperação da informação desde os mecanismos de busca até a Web Semântica. Conclui-se que, apesar da inquestionável importância dos métodos e técnicas computacionais no tratamento da informação, estas se configuram apenas como ferramentas auxiliares, pois utilizam uma conceituação de “informação” extremamente restrita em relação àquela utilizada pela Ciência da Informação / Since its birth, Information Science has been studying methods for the automatic treatment of information. This research has focused on Information Retrieval, an area that involves the application of computational methods in the treatment and retrieval of information, in order to assess how Computer Science contributes to the progress of Information Science. Initially, Information Retrieval is contextualized in the interdisciplinary body of Information Science and, after that, the basic elements of the information retrieval process are presented. Computational models related to information retrieval are analyzed according to "quantitative" and "dynamic" categories. Some natural language processing techniques used in information retrieval are equally discussed. In the current context of the Web, the techniques of information retrieval are presented, from search engines to the Semantic Web. It can be concluded that in spite of the unquestionable importance of the computational methods and techniques for dealing with information, they are regarded only as auxiliary tools, because their concept of "information" is extremely restrict in relation to that used by the Information Science.

La recherche d'informations s'intéresse, entre autres, à répondre à des questions comme: est-ce qu'un document est pertinent à une requête ? Est-ce que deux requêtes ou deux documents sont similaires ? Comment la similarité entre deux requêtes ou documents peut être utilisée pour améliorer l'estimation de la pertinence ? Pour donner réponse à ces questions, il est nécessaire d'associer chaque document et requête à des représentations interprétables par ordinateur. Une fois ces représentations estimées, la similarité peut correspondre, par exemple, à une distance ou une divergence qui opère dans l'espace de représentation. On admet généralement que la qualité d'une représentation a un impact direct sur l'erreur d'estimation par rapport à la vraie pertinence, jugée par un humain. Estimer de bonnes représentations des documents et des requêtes a longtemps été un problème central de la recherche d'informations. Le but de cette thèse est de proposer des nouvelles méthodes pour estimer les représentations des documents et des requêtes, la relation de pertinence entre eux et ainsi modestement avancer l'état de l'art du domaine. Nous présentons quatre articles publiés dans des conférences internationales et un article publié dans un forum d'évaluation. Les deux premiers articles concernent des méthodes qui créent l'espace de représentation selon une connaissance à priori sur les caractéristiques qui sont importantes pour la tâche à accomplir. Ceux-ci nous amènent à présenter un nouveau modèle de recherche d'informations qui diffère des modèles existants sur le plan théorique et de l'efficacité expérimentale. Les deux derniers articles marquent un changement fondamental dans l'approche de construction des représentations. Ils bénéficient notamment de l'intérêt de recherche dont les techniques d'apprentissage profond par réseaux de neurones, ou deep learning, ont fait récemment l'objet. Ces modèles d'apprentissage élicitent automatiquement les caractéristiques importantes pour la tâche demandée à partir d'une quantité importante de données. Nous nous intéressons à la modélisation des relations sémantiques entre documents et requêtes ainsi qu'entre deux ou plusieurs requêtes. Ces derniers articles marquent les premières applications de l'apprentissage de représentations par réseaux de neurones à la recherche d'informations. Les modèles proposés ont aussi produit une performance améliorée sur des collections de test standard. Nos travaux nous mènent à la conclusion générale suivante: la performance en recherche d'informations pourrait drastiquement être améliorée en se basant sur les approches d'apprentissage de représentations. / Information retrieval is generally concerned with answering questions such as: is this document relevant to this query? How similar are two queries or two documents? How query and document similarity can be used to enhance relevance estimation? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to access computational representations of documents and queries. For example, similarities between documents and queries may correspond to a distance or a divergence defined on the representation space. It is generally assumed that the quality of the representation has a direct impact on the bias with respect to the true similarity, estimated by means of human intervention. Building useful representations for documents and queries has always been central to information retrieval research. The goal of this thesis is to provide new ways of estimating such representations and the relevance relationship between them. We present four articles that have been published in international conferences and one published in an information retrieval evaluation forum. The first two articles can be categorized as feature engineering approaches, which transduce a priori knowledge about the domain into the features of the representation. We present a novel retrieval model that compares favorably to existing models in terms of both theoretical originality and experimental effectiveness. The remaining two articles mark a significant change in our vision and originate from the widespread interest in deep learning research that took place during the time they were written. Therefore, they naturally belong to the category of representation learning approaches, also known as feature learning. Differently from previous approaches, the learning model discovers alone the most important features for the task at hand, given a considerable amount of labeled data. We propose to model the semantic relationships between documents and queries and between queries themselves. The models presented have also shown improved effectiveness on standard test collections. These last articles are amongst the first applications of representation learning with neural networks for information retrieval. This series of research leads to the following observation: future improvements of information retrieval effectiveness has to rely on representation learning techniques instead of manually defining the representation space.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans le domaine de la recherche d’information (RI) et la recommandation de lecture. Elle a pour objets :— La création de nouvelles approches de recherche de documents utilisant des techniques de combinaison de résultats, d’agrégation de données sociales et de reformulation de requêtes ;— La création d’une approche de recommandation utilisant des méthodes de RI et les graphes entre les documents. Deux collections de documents ont été utilisées. Une collection qui provient de l’évaluation CLEF (tâche Social Book Search - SBS) et la deuxième issue du domaine des sciences humaines et sociales (OpenEdition, principalement Revues.org). La modélisation des documents de chaque collection repose sur deux types de relations :— Dans la première collection (CLEF SBS), les documents sont reliés avec des similarités calculées par Amazon qui se basent sur plusieurs facteurs (achats des utilisateurs, commentaires, votes, produits achetés ensemble, etc.) ;— Dans la deuxième collection (OpenEdition), les documents sont reliés avec des relations de citations (à partir des références bibliographiques).Le manuscrit est structuré en deux parties. La première partie «état de l’art» regroupe une introduction générale, un état de l’art sur la RI et sur les systèmes de recommandation. La deuxième partie «contributions» regroupe un chapitre sur la détection de comptes rendus de lecture au sein de la collection OpenEdition (Revues.org), un chapitre sur les méthodes de RI utilisées sur des requêtes complexes et un dernier chapitre qui traite l’approche de recommandation proposée qui se base sur les graphes. / This thesis deals with the field of information retrieval and the recommendation of reading. It has for objects:— The creation of new approach of document retrieval and recommendation using techniques of combination of results, aggregation of social data and reformulation of queries;— The creation of an approach of recommendation using methods of information retrieval and graph theories.Two collections of documents were used. First one is a collection which is provided by CLEF (Social Book Search - SBS) and the second from the platforms of electronic sources in Humanities and Social Sciences OpenEdition.org (Revues.org). The modelling of the documents of every collection is based on two types of relations:— For the first collection (SBS), documents are connected with similarity calculated by Amazon which is based on several factors (purchases of the users, the comments, the votes, products bought together, etc.);— For the second collection (OpenEdition), documents are connected with relations of citations, extracted from bibliographical references.We show that the proposed approaches bring in most of the cases gain in the performances of research and recommendation. The manuscript is structured in two parts. The first part "state of the art" includes a general introduction, a state of the art of informationretrieval and recommender systems. The second part "contributions" includes a chapter on the detection of reviews of books in Revues.org; a chapter on the methods of IR used on complex queries written in natural language and last chapter which handles the proposed approach of recommendation which is based on graph.