This paper proposes a novel topic inference framework that is built on the scalability and adaptability of mutual information (MI) techniques. The framework is designed to systematically construct a more robust language model (LM) for topic-oriented search terms in the domain of electronic programming guide (EPG) for broadcast TV programs. The topic inference system identifies the most relevant topics implied from a search term, based on a simplified MI-based classifier trained from a highly structured XML-based text corpus, which is derived from continuously updated EPG data feeds. The proposed framework is evaluated against a set of EPG-specific queries from a large user population collected from a real world web-based IR system. The MI-base topic inference system is able to achieve 98 percent accuracy in recall measurement and 82 percent accuracy in precision measurement on the test set.
['Harry Chang']
Topics inference by weighted mutual information measures computed from structured corpus