1333290
History repeats itself: repeat queries in Yahoo's logs
Thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet search engine search box, users have come to depend on search engines both to find and re-find information. However, re-finding behavior has not been significantly addressed. Here we look at re-finding queries issued to the Yahoo! search engine by 114 users over a year.
207159138
Generating query substitutions
We introduce the notion of query substitution, that is, generating a new query to replace a user's original search query. Our technique uses modifications based on typical substitutions web searchers make to their queries. In this way the new query is strongly related to the original query, containing terms closely related to all of the original terms. This contrasts with query expansion through pseudo-relevance feedback, which is costly and can lead to query drift. This also contrasts with query relaxation through boolean or TFIDF retrieval, which reduces the specificity of the query. We define a scale for evaluating query substitution, and show that our method performs well at generating new queries related to the original queries. We build a model for selecting between candidates, by using a number of features relating the query-candidate pair, and by fitting the model to human judgments of relevance of query suggestions. This further improves the quality of the candidates generated. Experiments show that our techniques significantly increase coverage and effectiveness in the setting of sponsored search.
5135848
Using temporal profiles of queries for precision prediction
A key missing component in information retrieval systems is self-diagnostic tests to establish whether the system can provide reasonable results for a given query on a document collection. If we can measure properties of a retrieved set of documents which allow us to predict average precision, we can automate the decision of whether to elicit relevance feedback, or modify the retrieval system in other ways. We use meta-data attached to documents in the form of time stamps to measure the distribution of documents retrieved in response to a query, over the time domain, to create a temporal profile for a query. We define some useful features over this temporal profile. We find that using these temporal features, together with the content of the documents retrieved, we can improve the prediction of average precision for a query.
15205488
Query word deletion prediction
Web search query logs contain traces of users' search modifications. One strategy users employ is deleting terms, presumably to obtain greater coverage. It is useful to model and automate term deletion when arbitrary searches are conjunctively matched against a small hand constructed collection, such as a hand-built hierarchy, or collection of high-quality pages matched with key phrases. Queries with no matches can have words deleted till a match is obtained. We provide algorithms which perform substantially better than the baseline in predicting which word should be deleted from a reformulated query, for increasing query coverage in the context of web search on small high-quality collections.
915422
Experiments in Spoken Document Retrieval at CMU
Experience de recherche d'information sur un corpus representant 70 heures d'informations radiodiffusees (CMU= Carnegie Mellon University)
10387396
N Semantic Classes are Harder than Two
We show that we can automatically classify semantically related phrases into 10 classes. Classification robustness is improved by training with multiple sources of evidence, including within-document cooccurrence, HTML markup, syntactic relationships in sentences, substitutability in query logs, and string similarity. Our work provides a benchmark for automatic n-way classification into WordNet's semantic classes, both on a TREC news corpus and on a corpus of substitutable search query phrases.
5421455
Self-Consistency Checking
We introduce the notion of self-consistency checking, a new methodology for applying formal methods in the debugging process. Intuitively, self-consistency checks functional consistency of a circuit in two different modes or environments. Self-consistency can (1) simplify property verification and (2) enable the use of symbolic simulation in the absence of a concrete specification. We present a correctness model for property verification with self-consistency checking and the formal framework for the technique. Finally, we provide illustrative examples and partial verification results using self-consistency checking on circuits with many thousands of latches.
26305456
Tail Recursion without Space Leaks
The G-machine (Johnsson, 1987; Peyton Jones, 1987) is a compiled graph reduction machine for lazy functional languages. The G-machine compiler contains many optimizations to improve performance. One set of such optimizations is designed to improve the performance of tail recursive functions. Unfortunately, the abstract machine is subject to a space leak—objects are unnecessarily preserved by the garbage collector. This paper analyses why a particular form of space leak occurs in the G-machine, and presents some ideas for fixing this problem. This phenomena in other abstract machines is also examined briefly.
31257323
Partitioning the edges of a graph
Abstract For any integer m (≥2), it is known that there are simple graphs of maximum valence m whose edges cannot be coloured with m colours in such a way that adjacent edges shall have different colours. We find those values of m and k for which it is true that every simple graph whose maximum valence does not exceed mk can be coloured with m colours in such a way that no colour appears more than k times at any vertex.
11914137
TREC-10 Experiments at University of Maryland CLIR and Video
The University of Maryland Researchers participated in both the Arabic-English Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and Video tracks of TREC-10. In the CLIR track, our goal was to explore effective monolingual Arabic IR techniques and effective query translation from English to Arabic for cross language IR. For the monolingual part, the use of the different index terms including words, stems, roots, and character n-grams were explored. For the English-Arabic CLIR, the use of MT, wordlist based translation, and non-dictionary words transliteration was explored. In the video track, we participated in the shot boundary detection, and known item search with the primary goals being to evaluate existing technology for shot detection and a new approach to extending simple visual image queries to video sequences. We present a general overview of the approaches, summarize the results in discuss how the algorithms are being extended.
16794414
A Framework for Microprocessor Correctness Statements
Most verifications of out-of-order microprocessors compare state-machine-based implementations and specifications, where the specification is based on the instruction-set architecture. The different efforts use a variety of correctness statements, implementations, and verification approaches. We present a framework for classifying correctness statements about safety that is independent of implementation representation and verification approach. We characterize the relationships between the different statements and illustrate how existing and classical approaches fit within this framework.