City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Seminar
Using Query Contexts for Information Retrieval
Presented by
Prof. Jian-Yun Nie
University of Montreal
Date: 16 July 2007, Monday
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: B7603 (Lift 3, 7/F, Blue Zone),Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
User query is an element that specifies an information need, but it is not the only one. Studies in literature have found many contextual factors that strongly influence the interpretation of a query. Recent studies have tried to consider the user’s interests by creating a user profile. However, a single profile for a user may not be sufficient for a variety of queries of the user. In this study, we propose to use query-specific contexts instead of user-centric ones, including context around query and context within query. The former specifies the environment of a query such as the domain of interest, while the latter refers to context words within the query, which is particularly useful for the selection of relevant term relations. Both types of context are integrated in an IR model based on language modeling. Our experiments on several TREC collections show that each of the context factors brings significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness.
Speaker
Jian-Yun Nie is professor in University of Montreal in Canada. He obtained his BSc. and PhD respectively from Southeast University in China and Joseph Fourier University in France. Since his PhD work, Jian-Yun Nie’s research has focused on problems of information retrieval and natural language processing. In 1999, He won the “Best paper” award at ACM-SIGIR conference for his work on cross-language information retrieval. He has published numerous research papers in top conferences and journals in these areas. He is program committee member and co-chair for many international conferences. He is currently an associate editor of the ACM transactions on Asian Language and Information Processing and is member of editorial board of Information Retrieval Journal and Journal of Chinese Information Processing.
