Even the best information retrieval model cannot always identify the most useful answers to a user query. This is in particular the case with web search systems, where it is known that users tend to minimise their effort to access relevant information. It is, however, believed that the interaction between users and a retrieval system, such as a web search engine, can be exploited to provide better answers to users. Interactive Information Retrieval (IR) systems, in which users access information through a series of interactions with the search system, are concerned with building models for IR, where interaction plays a central role. There are many possible interactions between a user and a search system, ranging from query (re)formulation to relevance feedback. However, capturing them within a single framework is difficult and previously proposed approaches have mostly focused on relevance feedback. In this paper, we propose a general framework for interactive IR that is able to capture the full interaction process in a principled way. Our approach relies upon a generalisation of the probability framework of quantum physics, whose strong geometric component can be a key towards a successful interactive IR model.
The most related work in that field is that of Melucci's @cite_19 , which computes the probability of having a given context @math , where @math is the probability distribution generated by the document vector @math , and the subspace @math is equalled to the context and is built through user interaction. More specifically, given a set of documents deemed relevant, either using user feedback or pseudo-relevance feedback, one can compute a subspace @math corresponding to the principal components of a subspace spanned by those documents. A document vector fully included in this space will be fully relevant (probability of 1), an orthogonal one will be fully irrelevant (zero probability). Melucci's approach is dual to ours, in the sense that instead of representing users in an IN space, he considers documents in a contextual space. Our approach, which relies on an IN space, facilitates the possibility of using the different quantum evolution mechanisms to model the interaction between the user and the retrieval system.
@cite_19
2015419638
Motivated by the commonly used faceted search interface in e-commerce, this paper investigates interactive relevance feedback mechanism based on faceted document metadata. In this mechanism, the system recommends a group of document facet-value pairs, and lets users select relevant ones to restrict the returned documents. We propose four facet-value pair recommendation approaches and two retrieval models that incorporate user feedback on document facets. Evaluated based on user feedback collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk, our experimental results show that the Boolean filtering approach, which is widely used in faceted search in e-commerce, doesn't work well for text document retrieval, due to the incompleteness (low recall) of metadata assignment in semi-structured text documents. Instead, a soft model performs more effectively. The faceted feedback mechanism can also be combined with document-based relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback to further improve the retrieval performance. Let @math @math be a given set of @math string documents of total length @math , our task is to index @math , such that the @math most relevant documents for an online query pattern @math of length @math can be retrieved efficiently. We propose an index of size @math bits and @math query time for the basic relevance metric , where @math is the size (in bits) of a compressed full text index of @math , with @math time for searching a pattern of length @math . We further reduce the space to @math bits, however the query time will be @math , where @math is the alphabet size and @math is any constant. User feedback is considered to be a critical element in the information seeking process. An important aspect of the feedback cycle is relevance assessment that has progressively become a popular practice in web searching activities and interactive information retrieval (IR). The value of relevance assessment lies in the disambiguation of the user's information need, which is achieved by applying various feedback techniques. Such techniques vary from explicit to implicit and help determine the relevance of the retrieved documents. The former type of feedback is usually obtained through the explicit and intended indication of documents as relevant (positive feedback) or irrelevant (negative feedback). Explicit feedback is a robust method for improving a system's overall retrieval performance and producing better query reformulations [1], at the expense of users' cognitive resources. On the other hand, implicit feedback techniques tend to collect information on search behavior in a more intelligent and unobtrusive manner. By doing so, they disengage the users from the cognitive burden of document rating and relevance judgments. Information-seeking activities such as reading time, saving, printing, selecting and referencing have been all treated as indicators of relevance, despite the lack of sufficient evidence to support their effectiveness [2]. Besides their apparent differences, both categories of feedback techniques determine document relevance with respect to the cognitive and situational levels of the interactive dialogue that occurs between the user and the retrieval system [5]. However, this approach does not account for the dynamic interplay and adaptation that takes place between the different dialogue levels, but most importantly it does not consider the affective dimension of interaction. Users interact with intentions, motivations and feelings apart from real-life problems and information objects, which are all critical aspects of cognition and decision-making [3][4]. By evaluating users' affective response towards an information object (e.g. a document), prior and post to their exposure to it, a more accurate understanding of the object's properties and degree of relevance to the current information need may be facilitated. Furthermore, systems that can detect and respond accordingly to user emotions could potentially improve the naturalness of human-computer interaction and progressively optimize their retrieval strategy. The current study investigates the role of emotions in the information seeking process, as the latter are communicated through multi-modal interaction, and reconsiders relevance feedback with respect to what occurs on the affective level of interaction as well. Given a set @math of @math strings of total length @math , our task is to report the "most relevant"strings for a given query pattern @math . This involves somewhat more advanced query functionality than the usual pattern matching, as some notion of "most relevant" is involved. In information retrieval literature, this task is best achieved by using inverted indexes. However, inverted indexes work only for some predefined set of patterns. In the pattern matching community, the most popular pattern-matching data structures are suffix trees and suffix arrays. However, a typical suffix tree search involves going through all the occurrences of the pattern over the entire string collection, which might be a lot more than the required relevant documents. The first formal framework to study such kind of retrieval problems was given by [Muthukrishnan, 2002]. He considered two metrics for relevance: frequency and proximity. He took a threshold-based approach on these metrics and gave data structures taking @math words of space. We study this problem in a slightly different framework of reporting the top @math most relevant documents (in sorted order) under similar and more general relevance metrics. Our framework gives linear space data structure with optimal query times for arbitrary score functions. As a corollary, it improves the space utilization for the problems in [Muthukrishnan, 2002] while maintaining optimal query performance. We also develop compressed variants of these data structures for several specific relevance metrics.