Retrieval in Digital Libraries
INLS 235

Slide 2

What is Retrieved?
Well-structured data
Strings, values
DBMS
Text Documents
Surrogates
Full text
Other media
Images, audio, video, statistics, code
Multimedia/mixed media
Answers

What are the ‘Sources of Evidence’ for Retrieval?
Words
Author’s words
Indexer’s words (metadata from a controlled vocabulary)
Actions
Human (e.g., publisher metadata, signatures)
System (e.g., date, watermarks)
Links (citations)
Human (citations, links)
System (computed from events or relationships, recommenders)

Retrieval Processes (how are needs expressed?)

Content-Centered Retrieval as Matching Document Representations to Query Representations

User-Centered Information-Seeking Process

Text Retrieval
1. Text retrieval is more complex than data retrieval from DBMS.
2. Distinguish searching for word matches from concept matches.
3. Distinguish subject from keyword search:
Subject:-->Search on a controlled vocabulary (e.g., LC subject headings).  The results point to documents.
Keyword-->Search all words in particular fields/text fragments.  The results point to documents.
4. Distinguish exact match from partial match (ranked) retrieval
5. Distinguish ASCII/UNICODE objects from bit maps

Approaches to Text Retrieval
1. Surrogate Search: Search a set of predefined words that point to related documents.  Requires indexing via some controlled vocabulary.
pros: natural transition from paper systems
cons: limited access; human indexing required
2. Full-Text Search: Search every word in every document.
pros: broaden access; possible to automate indexing
cons: words rather than concepts
3. Knowledge-Based Search: Search a set of concepts that are related to concepts in documents.
pros: improved retrieval
cons: computationally expensive; theoretical at present

Full-Text Search
Full-Text Search:
Search every word (or variant) in the document except stop words.
Use stemming?
Methods:
Text Scanning
Signatures
Indexes (inverted files)
Vectors (term document matrix)
Linkages (link analysis)
Recommendations (explicit or implicit)

Inverted File
Assumption: related objects use same words
Words  point to word number, offset, surrogate, or document:
aardvark    *Doc3, Doc 7, Doc45, Doc 67.....
abacus       Doc2, Doc16, Doc33, Doc 45, Doc 67, .....
.
.
.
.
zygote     Doc 7, Doc 33, Doc 67, Doc 123, ....
Find all Documents and then apply logical operators to combine
Query either matches or does not match
* actually Doc3,Para5,Word45

Vectors
Each document (or surrogate) is represented by a vector defined by every word in the collection.
Doc 1  0 0 1 1 0 0 ..... 0
Doc 2  0 0 0 0 1 1 ..... 0
.
Doc 7  1 0 0 1 0 0 ..... 1  (has aardvark and zygote)
.
Doc 33  0 1 0 0 0 0 ..... 1 (has abacus and zygote)
.
Doc 67  1 1 0 0 0 0 ..... 1 (has aardvark, abacus and zygote)
.
Doc N
Queries are expressed as vectors and matched to document vectors.  Degrees of matching are possible.

Latent Semantic Indexing
Like vector model, use document-term matrix.
Apply singular value decomposition (SVD) to produce a set of ranked eigenvalues.  These represent abstract concepts in the document space.
Select the top eigenvalues (e.g., first 200) and apply to query-document matching (See Efron dissertation)
Retrieves some documents that may not use the query term

Link Analysis: Citations
(relevance based on author judgments)
Some citation assumptions
If A cites (is linked to) B, then more likely that A is related to B than to arbitrary C.
If A and B are cited by (linked from) C, then A and B are more likely to be related than A or B to arbitrary D.  (co-citation)
If more objects cite A than cite B, then A is more ‘valued’ than B (citation value)
If highly ‘valued’ object A cites C and less ‘valued’ object B cites C, then A’s citation is more valuable.

Link Analysis
Assumption: related objects are linked
AàB or BàA è A~B
AàB, CàB è A~C
In links, out links
Hubs (lots of out links)
Authorities (lots of in links)
AuàB more important than AàB

Link parameters
‘In links’ (aka backlinks) are citations to the object, ‘out links’ are references to other objects (How to incorporate these distinctions?)
Link distance (number of hops? how to dampen? when to stop?)
Link traversal (number of times selected?)
Text window for a link (How much of the text around a link to consider in algorithms?)

Algorithms
HyperSearch: use links to get text from related objects and enrich the text models
PageRank: use only ‘in links.’  use link matrix of entire web.  Weight links recursively based on objects with many ‘in links.’  google
Hyperlink induced text search (HITS): use both in and out links.  Recursively define ‘hubs’ (objects that point to many good authorities) and authorities (objects that have many hubs pointing to them).  Use portion of the web.  Clever

Combining Multiple Sources of Evidence
Text analysis+Indexing+Link analysis
Kiduk Yang’s dissertation work
Add alternative document parameters
Adaptable fusion based on context?
Adaptable fusion based on user feedback and active engagement?

Document Alternatives
Paragraphs, passages
SGML/HTML/XML codes
‘Shape’ of text
Related problems:
text summarization/auto abstracting
auto categorization
question answering

Multimedia: Features for Indexing
Linguistic surrogates
Images
color, texture, luminosity, shape
Video
same as stills but add motion (e.g., optical flow)
Sound
speaker attributes, pitch, duration

Example: Color Histogram
Each pixel has color ‘depth’ (e.g., 16 bits)
Divide image into regions (e.g., 8x8 pixels)
Create a histogram for each region (amount of red, cyan, etc.)
The set of histograms serves as a quantitative representation for the image, allowing comparisons and rankings
Querying awkward (use QBE)

Information-Seeking Process Revisited

Interactive Systems: Agile Views
Overviews
Previews
Shared views
History views
Dynamic queries
Interplay between analytical search and interactive browsing

Digital Library IR Challenges
Across collections
Object granularities (image, collection, finding aid, etc.)?
‘Sub’ controlled vocabularies? (or metadata)
Multimedia features?
Interoperation of metadata?
Diverse user communities (known and unexpected)
Links outside the DL (branding, familiarity)

DL IR Challenges (cont’)
Search and Browse functionality balance
Keyword vs directory searching (The Bruza et al reading)
Collection maintenance (reindexing)
additions & deletions
Corrections (e.g., BLS)
User interfaces
Evaluation

Resources
Search engine watch http://searchenginewatch.com/
Keith van Rijsbergen’s book: Information Retrieval
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Preface.html
SIGIR  http://www.acm.org/sigir