A key concept in many Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, e.g. document indexing, query language modelling, aspect and diversity retrieval, is the relevance measurement of topics, i.e. to what extent an information object (e.g. a document or a query) is about the topics. This paper investigates the interference of relevance measurement of a topic caused by another topic. For example, consider that two user groups are required to judge whether a topic q is relevant to a document d, and q is presented together with another topic (referred to as a companion topic). If different companion topics are used for different groups, interestingly different relevance probabilities of q given d can be reached. In this paper, we present empirical results showing that the relevance of a topic to a document is greatly affected by the companion topic’s relevance to the same document, and the extent of the impact differs with respect to different companion topics. We further analyse the phenomenon from classical and quantum-like interference perspectives, and connect the phenomenon to nonreality and contextuality in quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that quantum like model fits in the empirical data, could be potentially used for predicting the relevance when interference exists.

The Predication-based Semantic Indexing (PSI) approach encodes both symbolic and distributional information into a semantic space using a permutation-based variant of Random Indexing. In this paper, we develop and evaluate a computational model of abductive reasoning based on PSI. Using distributional information, we identify pairs of concepts that are likely to be predicated about a common third concept, or middle term. As this occurs without the explicit identification of the middle term concerned, we refer to this process as a “logical leap”. Subsequently, we use further operations in the PSI space to retrieve this middle term and identify the predicate types involved. On evaluation using a set of 1000 randomly selected cue concepts, the model is shown to retrieve with accuracy concepts that can be connected to a cue concept by a middle term, as well as the middle term concerned, using nearest-neighbor search in the PSI space. The utility of quantum logical operators as a means to identify alternative paths through this space is also explored.

The four intensive problems to the software rose by the software industry .i.e., User System Communication / Human Machine Interface, Meta Data extraction, Information processing & management and Data representation are discussed in this research paper. To contribute in the field we have proposed and described an intelligent semantic oriented agent based search engine including the concepts of intelligent graphical user interface, natural language based information processing, data management and data reconstruction for the final user end information representation.

Web development is a challenging research area for its creativity and complexity. The existing raised key challenge in web technology technologic development is the presentation of data in machine read and process able format to take advantage in knowledge based information extraction and maintenance. Currently it is not possible to search and extract optimized results using full text queries because there is no such mechanism exists which can fully extract the semantic from full text queries and then look for particular knowledge based information.

Analyzing clickthrough log data is important for improving search performance as well as understanding user behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative ranking model to tackle two difficulties in analyzing clickthrough log. First, previous studies have shown that users tend to click top-ranked results even they are less relevant. Therefore, we use pairwise ranking relation to avoid the position bias in clicks. Second, since click data are extremely sparse with respect to each query or user, we construct a collaboration model to eliminate the sparseness problem. We also find that the proposed model and previous popular used click-based models address different aspects of clickthrough log data. We further propose a hybrid model that can achieve significant improvement compared to the baselines on a large-scale real world dataset.

Over the past decades, there have been significant efforts on developing robust and easy-to-use query interfaces to databases. So far, the typical query interfaces are GUI-based visual query interfaces. Visual query interfaces however, have limitations especially when they are used for accessing large and complex datasets. Therefore, we are developing a novel query interface where users can use natural language expressions to help author visual queries. Our work enhances the usability of a visual query interface by directly addressing the "knowledge gap" issue in visual query interfaces. We have applied our work in several real-world applications. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

As the semantic web grows in popularity and enters the mainstream of computer technology, RDF (Resource Description Framework) datasets are becoming larger and more complex. Advanced semantic web ontologies, especially in medicine and science, are developing. As more complex ontologies are developed, there is a growing need for efficient queries that handle inference. In areas such as research, it is vital to be able to perform queries that retrieve not just facts but also inferred knowledge and uncertain information. OWL (Web Ontology Language) defines rules that govern provable inference in semantic web datasets. In this paper, we detail a database schema using bit vectors that is designed specifically for RDF datasets. We introduce a framework for materializing and storing inferred triples. Our bit vector schema enables storage of inferred knowledge without a query performance penalty. Inference queries are simplified and performance is improved. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our inference solution is more scalable and efficient than the current state-of-the-art. There are also standards being developed for representing probabilistic reasoning within OWL ontologies. We specify a framework for materializing uncertain information and probabilities using these ontologies. We define a multiple vector schema for representing probabilities and classifying uncertain knowledge using thresholds. This solution increases the breadth of information that can be efficiently retrieved.

Software developers increasingly rely on information from the Web, such as documents or code examples on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to facilitate their development processes. However, API documents often do not include enough information for developers to fully understand the API usages, while searching for good code examples requires non-trivial efforts. To address this problem, we propose a novel code search engine, combining the strength of browsing documents and searching for code examples, by returning documents embedded with high-quality code example summaries mined from the Web. Our evaluation results show that our approach provides code examples with high precision and boosts programmer productivity.

Online forums contain valuable human-generated information. End-users looking for information would like to find only those threads in forums where relevant information is present. Due to the distinctive characteristics of forum pages from generic web pages, special techniques are required to organize and search for information in these forums. Threads and pages in forums are different from other webpages in their hyperlinking patterns. Forum posts also have associated social and non-textual metadata. In this paper, we propose a model for online thread retrieval based on inference networks that utilizes the structural properties of forum threads. We also investigate the effects of incorporating various relevance indicators in our model. We empirically show the effectiveness of our proposed model using real-world data.

In order to improve the user search experience, Query Suggestion, a technique for generating alternative queries to Web users, has become an indispensable feature for commercial search engines. However, previous work mainly focuses on suggesting relevant queries to the original query while ignoring the diversity in the suggestions, which will potentially dissatisfy Web users' information needs. In this paper, we present a novel unified method to suggest both semantically relevant and diverse queries to Web users. The proposed approach is based on Markov random walk and hitting time analysis on the query-URL bipartite graph. It can effectively prevent semantically redundant queries from receiving a high rank, hence encouraging diversities in the results. We evaluate our method on a large commercial clickthrough dataset in terms of relevance measurement and diversity measurement. The experimental results show that our method is very effective in generating both relevant and diverse query suggestions.