ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE

DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SCIENCE MBA PROGRAM

(inss :612): Modern Information Retrieval

Article review
Article Title: Information Retrieval Approach based on Recursive Query Shifting

by

Mawloud Mosbah

Mawloud Mosbah. Information Retrieval Approach based on Recursive Query Shifting. International
Conference on Artificial intelligence and Information Technology (ICA2IT’19), Mar 2019, Ouargla,
Algeria. pp.225-232. hal-02934510
Submitted to Dereje Teferi (PhD)

Prepared by

Name ID No

• Eyob Negussie GSE/0249/14

Sept. 8, 2022 G.C

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Introduction
Users are generally assumed to have unquenchable thirst for information regardless of the
presentation. However Relevance is only discussed in information retrieval as the
correspondence, in terms of information, between document and query. The paper
introduced an information retrieval approach named Recursive Query Shifting that
continuously nourishes the information need without losing relevance.

Overall purpose
The author pointed out an interesting relation between database systems of structured
data and information retrieval. Information retrieval is found to be ineligible as a well-
defined problem for the reason that the information being addressed is semi-structured or
unstructured one. Addressing vague problems require improvement and enhancement
through post-processing steps. The paper address this gap by proposing and testing an
approach that digest the original results continuously in an attempt for bringing a lot of
related data from the various aspects of the query.
The proposed approach is based on the idea that the collective decision for designating the
relevant elements is better than the single decision based commonly on the submitted
query.

Objective of the research

From Precision/Recall curves, insight is taken that the curve is downgrading starting from
a high point as a measure of decreasing relevance. IR systems are designed in a way to
retrieve the best matching result at the front and the less relevant behind. Considering the
first returned result as system validated best match for the user need, the paper proposes
method to use the front results as recursive query for cutting out imprecise results in the
process. This means the first returned documents are taken as the new query. This
approach was first adapted in content-based image retrieval. Now the study aims to see
how effective and efficient it is in retrieving text.

Research methodology
Information retrieval system is seen in three separate components: indexing stage, and
matching process, interrogation protocol.

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The indexing stage is handled by one of the models like Boolean model, vector space model
or probabilistic model. When it comes to matching process there are also options to
consider like measures based on distances, similarities, divergence and so on.

The paper mentions two kinds of relevance: system relevance and user relevance. System
relevance is referred to the score attributed by the system as a relevance evaluation for the
document content with respect to that of the submitted query. Such relevance is
determinist. User relevance consists of the relevance judgement of the user for the results
answered by the system. Such relevance is deemed non-determinist and subjective.

through relevance feedback scheme we can improve performance by closing on the gab
between system relevance and user relevance.

This scheme consists of user’s reflection of some documents according to his needs among
those returned to the user. These considerations will be taken as a feedback by the system.

In place of the users’ judgment there is an approach to look for some correlations and
regularities between results first fetched. This is called Pseudo relevance feedback. The
main aim for this kind of algorithms is to serve as clustering operation on information
retrieved by the system.

The finished result returned to the user as an answer for a query is technically based on
indexing method and the adopted matching measure. It is more close to the elements of the
database than the query itself. So, for reaching to the root of the query in a given set of
corpus it is found to be proper to capitalize on the element deemed to be most relevant and
find more results based on them.

The last perspective on information retrieval systems is about interrogation protocol

focusing on query shifting and reformation. There are many approaches that have been
used and the paper introduced a new approach called recursive query shifting.

The approach’s make-up is from the previously proposed models: query reformulation,
(pseudo) relevance feedback, and collective contribution of retrieved information and
multi-queries approach.

Findings from the research

Experiment was conducted on returned Google Scholar results as a text collection and
COREL-1K images benchmark showed the prominence of the approach for betterment of
results.

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The study introduces a Recursive Query Shifting approached by two algorithms: Query
Reformulation Method 1 & 2 (QRM1 and QRM2). QRM1 assumes each new retrieved result
as the new query to be considered while QRM2 considers the centroid of the all retrieved
results including the new retrieved result as the new query. Since QRM2 is theorized as a
revised version of the first Query Reformulation Method, we will focus on it for this review.
And since our focus is on text retrieval this review will ignore the image retrieval cases.

Initialization
COUNT 0
Step 1: The user submits the query: some key-words

Step 2: text query is sent to the system (for this experiment, the study is conducted on Google Scholar )

Step 3: receive documents results from Google Scholar.

Step 4: Results to be presented Results to be presented plus closest element

COUNT COUNT+1

Step5:new_Query centroid of Indexed Results to be Presented

( Σ DVR NDV )
Step 6: if COUNT<N then go to Step 2

Step 7: END.

Where: DVR are documents to be visualized representation, and NDV is the number of documents
to be visualized

Experiment and testing

For testing the effectiveness of the algorithms, the experiments into COREL-1K images
collection and into some documents returned by Google Scholar was conducted as results
for some submitted queries. For the evaluation metrics, the author have utilized precision,
recall, utility value.

Result
QRM2 outperforms many shifting query techniques of literature in the case of image
retrieval while QRM1 improves relatively the accuracy of Google Scholar for the case of text
retrieval.

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Conclusion
The study is an eye-opener for me, as I have seen how a simple approach to tweak
information retrieval can have an ever improving and powerful change that can
revolutionize the industry. Recursive query shifting is found to be promising in the
experiments.