Abstract — The Web has the potential to become the world’s largest knowledge base. In order to unleash this potential, the wealth of information available on the Web needs to be extracted and organized. There is a need for new querying techniques that are simple and yet more expressive than those provided by standard keyword-based search engines. Searching for knowledge rather than Web pages needs to consider inherent semantic structures like entities (person, organization, etc.) and relationships (isA, locatedIn, etc.). In this paper, we propose NAGA, a new semantic search engine. NAGA builds on a knowledge base, which is organized as a graph with typed edges, and consists of millions of entities and relationships extracted from Web-based corpora. A graph-based query language enables the formulation of queries with additional semantic information. We introduce a novel scoring model, based on the principles of generative language models, which formalizes several notions such as confidence, informativeness and compactness and uses them to rank query results. We demonstrate NAGA’s superior result quality over state-of-the-art search engines and question answering systems. I.

Understanding user intent is key to designing an effective ranking system in a search engine. In the absence of any explicit knowledge of user intent, search engines want to diversify results to improve user satisfaction. In such a setting, the probability ranking principle-based approach of presenting the most relevant results on top can be sub-optimal, and hence the search engine would like to trade-off relevance for diversity in the results. In analogy to prior work on ranking and clustering systems, we use the axiomatic approach to characterize and design diversification systems. We develop a set of natural axioms that a diversification system is expected to satisfy, and show that no diversification function can satisfy all the axioms simultaneously. We illustrate the use of the axiomatic framework by providing three example diversification objectives that satisfy different subsets of the axioms. We also uncover a rich link to the facility dispersion problem that results in algorithms for a number of diversification objectives. Finally, we propose an evaluation methodology to characterize the objectives and the underlying axioms. We conduct a large scale evaluation of our objectives based on two data sets: a data set derived from the Wikipedia disambiguation pages and a product database.

Statistical language models have recently been successfully applied to many information retrieval problems. A great deal of recent work has shown that statistical language models not only lead to superior empirical performance, but also facilitate parameter tuning and open up possibilities for modeling nontraditional retrieval problems. In general, statistical language models provide a principled way of modeling various kinds of retrieval problems. The purpose of this survey is to systematically and critically review the existing work in applying statistical language models to information retrieval, summarize their contributions, and point out outstanding challenges. 1

This paper studies document ranking under uncertainty. It is tackled in a general situation where the relevance predictions of individual documents have uncertainty, and are dependent between each other. Inspired by the Modern Portfolio Theory, an economic theory dealing with investment in financial markets, we argue that ranking under uncertainty is not just about picking individual relevant documents, but about choosing the right combination of relevant documents. This motivates us to quantify a ranked list of documents on the basis of its expected overall relevance (mean) and its variance; the latter serves as a measure of risk, which was rarely studied for document ranking in the past. Through the analysis of the mean and variance, we show that an optimal rank order is the one that balancing the overall relevance (mean) of the ranked list against its risk level (variance). Based on this principle, we then derive an efficient document ranking algorithm. It generalizes the well-known probability ranking principle (PRP) by considering both the uncertainty of relevance predictions and correlations between retrieved documents. Moreover, the benefit of diversification is mathematically quantified; we show that diversifying documents is an effective way to reduce the risk of document ranking. Experimental results in text retrieval confirm the theoretical insights with improved retrieval performance.

The success of knowledge-sharing communities like Wikipedia and the advances in automatic information extraction from textual and Web sources have made it possible to build large “knowledge repositories” such as DBpedia, Freebase, and YAGO. These collections can be viewed as graphs of entities and relationships (ER graphs) and can be represented as a set of subject-property-object (SPO) triples in the Semantic-Web data model RDF. Queries can be expressed in the W3C-endorsed SPARQL language or by similarly designed graph-pattern search. However, exact-match query semantics often fall short of satisfying the users ’ needs by returning too many or too few results. Therefore, IR-style ranking models are crucially needed. In this paper, we propose a language-model-based approach to ranking the results of exact, relaxed and keyword-augmented graphpattern queries over RDF graphs such as ER graphs. Our method estimates a query model and a set of result-graph models and ranks results based on their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to the query model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our ranking model by a comprehensive user study.

This paper gives an overview on the YAGO-NAGA approach to information extraction for building a conveniently searchable, large-scale, highly accurate knowledge base of common facts. YAGO harvests infoboxes and category names of Wikipedia for facts about individual entities, and it reconciles these with the taxonomic backbone of WordNet in order to ensure that all entities have proper classes and the class system is consistent. Currently, the YAGO knowledge base contains about 19 million instances of binary relations for about 1.95 million entities. Based on intensive sampling, its accuracy is estimated to be above 95 percent. The paper presents the architecture of the YAGO extractor toolkit, its distinctive approach to consistency checking, its provisions for maintenance and further growth, and the query engine for YAGO, coined NAGA. It also discusses ongoing work on extensions towards integrating fact candidates extracted from natural-language text sources. 1.

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Result diversity is a topic of great importance as more facets of queries are discovered and users expect to find their desired facets in the first page of the results. However, the underlying questions of how ‘diversity ’ interplays with ‘quality’ and when preference should be given to one or both are not well-understood. In this work, we model the problem as expectation maximization and study the challenges of estimating the model parameters and reaching an equilibrium. One model parameter, for example, is correlations between pages which we estimate using textual contents of pages and click data (when available). We conduct experiments on diversifying randomly selected queries from a query log and the queries chosen from the disambiguation topics of Wikipedia. Our algorithm improves upon Google in terms of the diversity of random queries, retrieving 14 % to 38% more aspects of queries in top 5, while maintaining a precision very close to Google. On a more selective set of queries that are expected to benefit from diversification, our algorithm improves upon Google in terms of precision and diversity of the results, and significantly outperforms another baseline system for result diversification.

The proliferation of knowledge-sharing communities like Wikipedia and the advances in automated information extraction from Web pages enable the construction of large knowledge bases with facts about entities and their relationships. The facts can be represented in the RDF data model, as so-called subject-property-object triples, and can thus be queried by structured query languages like SPARQL. In principle, this allows precise querying in the database spirit. However, RDF data may be highly diverse and queries may return way too many results, so that ranking by informativeness measures is crucial to avoid overwhelming users. Moreover, as facts are extracted from textual contexts or have community-provided annotations, it can be beneficial to consider also keywords for formulating search requests. This paper gives an overview of recent and ongoing work on ranked retrieval of RDF data with keyword-augmented structured queries. The ranking method is based on statistical language models, the state-of-the-art paradigm in information retrieval. The paper develops a novel form of language models for the structured, but schema-less setting of RDF triples and extended SPARQL queries. 1

Abstract. This paper concerns document ranking in information retrieval. In information retrieval systems, the widely accepted probability ranking principle (PRP) suggests that, for optimal retrieval, documents should be ranked in order of decreasing probability of relevance. In this paper, we present a new document ranking paradigm, arguing that a better, more general solution is to optimize top-n ranked documents as a whole, rather than ranking them independently. Inspired by the Modern Portfolio Theory in finance, we quantify a ranked list of documents on the basis of its expected overall relevance (mean) and its variance; the latter serves as a measure of risk, which was rarely studied for document ranking in the past. Through the analysis of the mean and variance, we show that an optimal rank order is the one that maximizes the overall relevance (mean) of the ranked list at a given risk level (variance). Based on this principle, we then derive an efficient document ranking algorithm. It extends the PRP by considering both the uncertainty of relevance predictions and correlations between retrieved documents. Furthermore, we quantify the benefits of diversification, and theoretically show that diversifying documents is an effective way to reduce the risk of document ranking. Experimental results on the collaborative filtering problem confirms the theoretical insights with improved recommendation performance, e.g., achieved over 300 % performance gain over the PRP-based ranking on the user-based recommendation. 1