Time-aware query suggestion diversification for temporally ambiguous queries

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 725-744
Author(s):  
Xiaojuan Zhang ◽  
Xixi Jiang ◽  
Jiewen Qin
Keyword(s):  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Web Search ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Experimental Information ◽  
Query Suggestion ◽  
High Coverage ◽  
Query Log ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
Time Aware

Purpose The purpose of this study is to generate diversified results for temporally ambiguous queries and the candidate queries are ensured to have a high coverage of subtopics, which are derived from different temporal periods. Design/methodology/approach Two novel time-aware query suggestion diversification models are developed by integrating semantics and temporality information involved in queries into two state-of-the-art explicit diversification algorithms (i.e. IA-select and xQuaD), respectively, and then specifying the components on which these two models rely on. Most importantly, first explored is how to explicitly determine query subtopics for each unique query from the query log or clicked documents and then modeling the subtopics into query suggestion diversification. The discussion on how to mine temporal intent behind a query from query log is also followed. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposal, experiments on a real-world query log are conducted. Findings Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of producing the candidate query suggestion for temporally ambiguous queries. Originality/value This study reports the first attempt to generate query suggestions indicating diverse interested time points to the temporally ambiguous (input) queries. The research will be useful in enhancing users’ search experience through helping them to formulate accurate queries for their search tasks. In addition, the approaches investigated in the paper are general enough to be used in many domains; that is, experimental information retrieval systems, Web search engines, document archives and digital libraries.

A framework for designing retrieval effectiveness studies of library information systems using human relevance assessments

2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Behnert ◽  
Dirk Lewandowski
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Public Access ◽  
First Century ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Modern Library ◽  
Retrieval Effectiveness ◽  
Effectiveness Studies ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to apply traditional information retrieval (IR) evaluation methods based on standards from the Text REtrieval Conference and web search evaluation to all types of modern library information systems (LISs) including online public access catalogues, discovery systems, and digital libraries that provide web search features to gather information from heterogeneous sources. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply conventional procedures from IR evaluation to the LIS context considering the specific characteristics of modern library materials. Findings The authors introduce a framework consisting of five parts: search queries, search results, assessors, testing, and data analysis. The authors show how to deal with comparability problems resulting from diverse document types, e.g., electronic articles vs printed monographs and what issues need to be considered for retrieval tests in the library context. Practical implications The framework can be used as a guideline for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies in the library context. Originality/value Although a considerable amount of research has been done on IR evaluation, and standards for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies do exist, to the authors’ knowledge this is the first attempt to provide a systematic framework for evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of twenty-first-century LISs. The authors demonstrate which issues must be considered and what decisions must be made by researchers prior to a retrieval test.

scholarly journals Representing search tasks in an information use environment: a case of English primary schools

2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (6) ◽  
pp. 1370-1395
Author(s):  
Sophie Rutter ◽  
Elaine G. Toms ◽  
Paul David Clough
Keyword(s):  
School Children ◽  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Work Task ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
Search Systems

Purpose To design effective task-responsive search systems, sufficient understanding of users’ tasks must be gained and their characteristics described. Although existing multi-dimensional task schemes can be used to describe users’ search and work tasks, they do not take into account the information use environment (IUE) that contextualises the task. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach With a focus on English primary schools, in four stages a multi-dimensional task scheme was developed that distinguishes between task characteristics generic to all environments, and those that are specific to schools. In Stage 1, a provisional scheme was developed based upon the existing literature. In the next two stages, through interviews with teachers and observations of school children, the provisional scheme was populated and revised. In Stage 4, whether search tasks with the same information use can be distinguished by their characteristics was examined. Findings Ten generic characteristics were identified (nature of work task, search task originator, search task flexibility, search task doer, search task necessity, task output, search goal, stage in work task, resources and information use) and four characteristics specific to primary schools (curricular area, use in curricular area, planning and location). For the different information uses, some characteristics are more typical than others. Practical implications The resulting scheme, based on children’s real-life information seeking, should be used in the design and evaluation of search systems and digital libraries that support school children. More generally, the scheme can also be used in other environments. Originality/value This is the first study to develop a multi-dimensional task scheme that considers encompasses the IUE.

scholarly journals An investigation of biases in web search engine query suggestions

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Bonart ◽  
Anastasiia Samokhina ◽  
Gernot Heisenberg ◽  
Philipp Schaer
Keyword(s):  
Search Engine ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Query Suggestion ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Web Search Engine ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Query Suggestions ◽  
Over Time

Purpose Survey-based studies suggest that search engines are trusted more than social media or even traditional news, although cases of false information or defamation are known. The purpose of this paper is to analyze query suggestion features of three search engines to see if these features introduce some bias into the query and search process that might compromise this trust. The authors test the approach on person-related search suggestions by querying the names of politicians from the German Bundestag before the German federal election of 2017. Design/methodology/approach This study introduces a framework to systematically examine and automatically analyze the varieties in different query suggestions for person names offered by major search engines. To test the framework, the authors collected data from the Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo query suggestion APIs over a period of four months for 629 different names of German politicians. The suggestions were clustered and statistically analyzed with regards to different biases, like gender, party or age and with regards to the stability of the suggestions over time. Findings By using the framework, the authors located three semantic clusters within the data set: suggestions related to politics and economics, location information and personal and other miscellaneous topics. Among other effects, the results of the analysis show a small bias in the form that male politicians receive slightly fewer suggestions on “personal and misc” topics. The stability analysis of the suggested terms over time shows that some suggestions are prevalent most of the time, while other suggestions fluctuate more often. Originality/value This study proposes a novel framework to automatically identify biases in web search engine query suggestions for person-related searches. Applying this framework on a set of person-related query suggestions shows first insights into the influence search engines can have on the query process of users that seek out information on politicians.

An investigation of benchmark image collections: how different from digital libraries?

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingye Qu ◽  
Jiangping Chen
Keyword(s):  
Image Processing ◽  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Natural Image ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Coding Scheme ◽  
Construction Methods ◽  
Application Fields ◽  
Image Organization

Purpose This paper aims to introduce the construction methods, image organization, collection use and access of benchmark image collections to the digital library (DL) community. It aims to connect two distinct communities: the DL community and image processing researchers so that future image collections could be better constructed, organized and managed for both human and computer use. Design/methodology/approach Image collections are first identified through an extensive literature review of published journal articles and a web search. Then, a coding scheme focusing on image collections’ creation, organization, access and use is developed. Next, three major benchmark image collections are analysed based on the proposed coding scheme. Finally, the characteristics of benchmark image collections are summarized and compared to DLs. Findings Although most of the image collections in DLs are carefully curated and organized using various metadata schema based on an image’s external features to facilitate human use, the benchmark image collections created for promoting image processing algorithms are annotated on an image’s content to the pixel level, which makes each image collection a more fine-grained, organized database appropriate for developing automatic techniques on classification summarization, visualization and content-based retrieval. Research limitations/implications This paper overviews image collections by their application fields. The three most representative natural image collections in general areas are analysed in detail based on a homemade coding scheme, which could be further extended. Also, domain-specific image collections, such as medical image collections or collections for scientific purposes, are not covered. Practical implications This paper helps DLs with image collections to understand how benchmark image collections used by current image processing research are created, organized and managed. It informs multiple parties pertinent to image collections to collaborate on building, sustaining, enriching and providing access to image collections. Originality/value This paper is the first attempt to review and summarize benchmark image collections for DL managers and developers. The collection creation process and image organization used in these benchmark image collections open a new perspective to digital librarians for their future DL collection development.

scholarly journals Medical Concept Embedding with Time-Aware Attention

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiangrui Cai ◽  
Jinyang Gao ◽  
Kee Yuan Ngiam ◽  
Beng Chin Ooi ◽  
Ying Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Medical Records ◽  
Medical Records ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
Medical Concept ◽  
Diagnosis Codes ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Concepts ◽  
Time Aware

Embeddings of medical concepts such as medication, procedure and diagnosis codes in Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are central to healthcare analytics. Previous work on medical concept embedding takes medical concepts and EMRs as words and documents respectively. Nevertheless, such models miss out the temporal nature of EMR data. On the one hand, two consecutive medical concepts do not indicate they are temporally close, but the correlations between them can be revealed by the time gap. On the other hand, the temporal scopes of medical concepts often vary greatly (e.g., common cold and diabetes). In this paper, we propose to incorporate the temporal information to embed medical codes. Based on the Continuous Bag-of-Words model, we employ the attention mechanism to learn a ``soft'' time-aware context window for each medical concept. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets through clustering and nearest neighbour search tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, showing that it outperforms five state-of-the-art baselines.

Evaluating citation visualization and exploration methods for supporting academic search tasks

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orland Hoeber ◽  
Taraneh Khazaei
Keyword(s):  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Ease Of Use ◽  
Information Need ◽  
Or Efficiency ◽  
Search Interface ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
Interactive Interfaces ◽  
Academic Search ◽  
Bow Tie

Purpose – Conducting academic searches within online digital libraries can be a difficult task due to the complexity of the searcher’s information need. The interfaces for such digital libraries commonly use simple search features that provide limited support for the fundamental strategies that academic searchers employ. The authors have developed a novel visualisation interface called Bow Tie Academic Search to address some of these shortcomings, and present in this paper the findings from a user evaluation. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A controlled laboratory study was conducted to compare a traditional search interface to Bow Tie Academic Search. In total, 24 graduate students were recruited to perform academic searches using the two candidate interfaces, guided by specific sub-tasks that focus on citation and keyword analysis strategies. Findings – Although the use of the core visualisation and exploration features did not reveal differences in retrieval effectiveness or efficiency, the query refinement features were found to be effective. Strongly positive impressions of usefulness and ease of use of all aspects of the system were reported, along with a preference for using Bow Tie Academic Search for academic search tasks. Originality/value – This study provides insight into the potential value for providing visual and interactive interfaces for supporting academic search tasks and strategies. While the quantitative improvements over the traditional search interface were minimal, the qualitative measures illustrate the value of Bow Tie Academic Search.

Report on the 4th Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries at SIGIR 2019

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran ◽  
Philipp Mayr
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Research And Development ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Digital Libraries ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Shared Task ◽  
Processing Information ◽  
Joint Workshop

The 4 th joint BIRNDL workshop was held at the 42nd ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019) in Paris, France. BIRNDL 2019 intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated different paper sessions and the 5 th edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task.

Performance measurement and management in the public sector: state of the art and research opportunities

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Garengo ◽  
Alberto Sardi
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Performance Measurement ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Business Management ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Research Opportunities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Organisations

PurposeSince the 1980s, performance measurement and management (PMM) has been described as an essential element of new public management (NPM) reforms. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state of the art and future research opportunities for PMM in public sector management.Design/methodology/approachThe paper carried out a bibliometric literature review using two main techniques named (1) performance analysis and (2) science mapping techniques. It investigated the academic research area describing the main publications' trend, the conceptual structure and its evolution from 1996 to 2019.FindingsThe results highlighted the growing relevance of PMM research in public organisations and confirmed a great interest of the business, management and accounting literature on PMM in public sector management. Furthermore, the results also described a conceptual structure of the public PMM literature analysed and its evolution being too generic to answer public organisations' needs. The results identified five main research gaps and research opportunities.Originality/valueAlthough the adoption of rigorous bibliometric techniques was recognised as being useful for assessing the academic research study, the paper describes the business, management and accounting literature contributing to new theoretical and practical future opportunities.

Information processing by elderly consumers: a five-decade review

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluigi Guido ◽  
Marco Pichierri ◽  
Cristian Rizzo ◽  
Verdiana Chieffi ◽  
George Moschis
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Processing Activity ◽  
Elderly Consumers

Purpose The purpose of this study is to review scholarly research on elderly consumers’ information processing and suggest implications for services marketing. Design/methodology/approach The review encompasses a five-decade period (1970–2018) of academic research and presents relevant literature in four main areas related to information processing: sensation, attention, interpretation and memory. Findings The study illustrates how each of the aforementioned phases of the information processing activity may affect how elderly individuals buy and consume products and services, emphasizing the need for a better comprehension of the elderly to develop effectual marketing strategies. Originality/value The study provides readers with detailed state-of-the-art knowledge about older consumers’ information processing, offering a comprehensive review of academic research that companies can use to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts that target the elderly market.

An experimental study on feature-based SLAM for multi-legged robots with RGB-D sensors

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał R. Nowicki ◽  
Dominik Belter ◽  
Aleksander Kostusiak ◽  
Petr Cížek ◽  
Jan Faigl ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Performance Metrics ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Bundle Adjustment ◽  
The State ◽  
Legged Robots ◽  
Evaluation Methodology ◽  
Walking Robots ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Feature Based

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate four different simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems in the context of localization of multi-legged walking robots equipped with compact RGB-D sensors. This paper identifies problems related to in-motion data acquisition in a legged robot and evaluates the particular building blocks and concepts applied in contemporary SLAM systems against these problems. The SLAM systems are evaluated on two independent experimental set-ups, applying a well-established methodology and performance metrics. Design/methodology/approach Four feature-based SLAM architectures are evaluated with respect to their suitability for localization of multi-legged walking robots. The evaluation methodology is based on the computation of the absolute trajectory error (ATE) and relative pose error (RPE), which are performance metrics well-established in the robotics community. Four sequences of RGB-D frames acquired in two independent experiments using two different six-legged walking robots are used in the evaluation process. Findings The experiments revealed that the predominant problem characteristics of the legged robots as platforms for SLAM are the abrupt and unpredictable sensor motions, as well as oscillations and vibrations, which corrupt the images captured in-motion. The tested adaptive gait allowed the evaluated SLAM systems to reconstruct proper trajectories. The bundle adjustment-based SLAM systems produced best results, thanks to the use of a map, which enables to establish a large number of constraints for the estimated trajectory. Research limitations/implications The evaluation was performed using indoor mockups of terrain. Experiments in more natural and challenging environments are envisioned as part of future research. Practical implications The lack of accurate self-localization methods is considered as one of the most important limitations of walking robots. Thus, the evaluation of the state-of-the-art SLAM methods on legged platforms may be useful for all researchers working on walking robots’ autonomy and their use in various applications, such as search, security, agriculture and mining. Originality/value The main contribution lies in the integration of the state-of-the-art SLAM methods on walking robots and their thorough experimental evaluation using a well-established methodology. Moreover, a SLAM system designed especially for RGB-D sensors and real-world applications is presented in details.

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