14429022
Mining long-term search history to improve search accuracy
Long-term search history contains rich information about a user's search preferences, which can be used as search context to improve retrieval performance. In this paper, we study statistical language modeling based methods to mine contextual information from long-term search history and exploit it for a more accurate estimate of the query language model. Experiments on real web search data show that the algorithms are effective in improving search accuracy for both fresh and recurring queries. The best performance is achieved when using clickthrough data of past searches that are related to the current query.
872843
Active feedback in ad hoc information retrieval
Information retrieval is, in general, an iterative search process, in which the user often has several interactions with a retrieval system for an information need. The retrieval system can actively probe a user with questions to clarify the information need instead of just passively responding to user queries. A basic question is thus how a retrieval system should propose questions to the user so that it can obtain maximum benefits from the feedback on these questions. In this paper, we study how a retrieval system can perform active feedback, i.e., how to choose documents for relevance feedback so that the system can learn most from the feedback information. We present a general framework for such an active feedback problem, and derive several practical algorithms as special cases. Empirical evaluation of these algorithms shows that the performance of traditional relevance feedback (presenting the top K documents) is consistently worse than that of presenting documents with more diversity. With a diversity-based selection algorithm, we obtain fewer relevant documents, however, these fewer documents have more learning benefits.
6914367
Context-sensitive information retrieval using implicit feedback
A major limitation of most existing retrieval models and systems is that the retrieval decision is made based solely on the query and document collection; information about the actual user and search context is largely ignored. In this paper, we study how to exploit implicit feedback information, including previous queries and clickthrough information, to improve retrieval accuracy in an interactive information retrieval setting. We propose several context-sensitive retrieval algorithms based on statistical language models to combine the preceding queries and clicked document summaries with the current query for better ranking of documents. We use the TREC AP data to create a test collection with search context information, and quantitatively evaluate our models using this test set. Experiment results show that using implicit feedback, especially the clicked document summaries, can improve retrieval performance substantially.
6579321
Discovering interesting patterns through user's interactive feedback
In this paper, we study the problem of discovering interesting patterns through user's interactive feedback. We assume a set of candidate patterns (ie, frequent patterns) has already been mined. Our goal is to help a particular user effectively discover interesting patterns according to his specific interest. Without requiring a user to explicitly construct a prior knowledge to measure the interestingness of patterns, we learn the user's prior knowledge from his interactive feedback. We propose two models to represent a user's prior: the log linear model and biased belief model. The former is designed for item-set patterns, whereas the latter is also applicable to sequential and structural patterns. To learn these models, we present a two-stage approach, progressive shrinking and clustering, to select sample patterns for feedback. The experimental results on real and synthetic data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
1982629
Efficient embedding K-ary complete trees into hypercubes
Dilated embedding and precise embedding of K-ary complete trees into hypercubes are studied. For dilated embedding, a nearly optimal algorithm is proposed which embeds a K-ary complete tree of height h, T/sub K/(h), into an (h/spl minus/1)/spl lsqb/logK/spl rsqb/+/spl lsqb/log(K+2)/spl rsqb/ dimensional hypercube with dilation max(2, /spl phi/(K)*), /spl phi/(K+2). For precise embedding, we show a (K/spl minus/1)h+1 dimensional hypercube is large enough to contain T/sub K/(h) as its subgraph for K/spl ges/3.<<ETX>>
7390429
Program-level adaptive memory management
Most application's performance is impacted by the amount of available memory. In a traditional application, which has a fixed working set size, increasing memory has a beneficial effect up until the application's working set is met. In the presence of garbage collection this relationship becomes more complex. While increasing the size of the program's heap reduces the frequency of collections, collecting a heap with memory paged to the backing store is very expensive. We first demonstrate the presence of an optimal heap size for a number of applications running on a machine with a specific configuration. We then introduce a scheme which adaptively finds this good heap size. In this scheme, we track the memory usage and number of page faults at a program's phase boundaries. Using this information, the system selects the soft heap size. By adapting itself dynamically, our scheme is independent of the underlying main memory size, code optimizations, and garbage collection algorithm. We present several experiments on real applications to show the effectiveness of our approach. Our results show that program-level heap control provides up to a factor of 7.8 overall speedup versus using the best possible fixed heap size controlled by the virtual machine on identical garbage collectors.
45794294
Embedding K-ary Complete Trees into Hypercubes
Abstract In this paper, dilated embedding and precise embedding of K-ary complete trees into hypercubes are studied. For dilated embedding, a nearly optimal algorithm is proposed which embeds a K-ary complete tree of height h, TK(h), into an (h − 1)[log K] + [log (K + 2)]-dimensional hypercube with dilation Max{2, φ(K), φ(K + 2)}. φ(x) = min{λ: Σλi=0Cid ≥ x and d = [log x]}. It is clear that [([log x] + 1)/2] ≤ φ(x) ≤ [log x], for x ≥ 3.) For precise embedding, we show a (K − 1)h + 1-dimensional hypercube is large enough to contain TK(h) as its subgraph, K ≥ 3.
302118
A Hierarchical Model of Reference Affinity
To improve performance, data reorganization needs locality models to identify groups of data that have reference affinity. Much past work is based on access frequency and does not consider accessing time directly. In this paper, we propose a new model of reference affinity. This model considers the distance between data accesses in addition to the frequency. Affinity groups defined by this model are consistent and have a hierarchical structure. The former property ensures the profitability of data packing, while the latter supports data packing for storage units of different sizes. We then present a statistical clustering method that identifies affinity groups among structure fields and data arrays by analyzing training runs of a program. When used by structure splitting and array regrouping, the new method improves the performance of two test programs by up to 31%. The new data layout is significantly better than that produced by the programmer or by static compiler analysis.
9685849
Adaptive data partition for sorting using probability distribution
Many computing problems benefit from dynamic partition of data into smaller chunks with better parallelism and locality. However, it is difficult to partition all types of inputs with the same high efficiency. This paper presents a new partition method in sorting scenario based on probability distribution, an idea first studied by Janus and Lamagna in early 1980's on a mainframe computer. The new technique makes three improvements. The first is a rigorous sampling technique that ensures accurate estimate of the probability distribution. The second is an efficient implementation on modern, cache-based machines. The last is the use of probability distribution in parallel sorting. Experiments show 10-30% improvement in partition balance and 20-70% reduction in partition overhead, compared to two commonly used techniques. The new method reduces the parallel sorting time by 33-50% and outperforms the previous fastest sequential sorting technique by up to 30%.