Chapter 9: Intelligent Web Search Through Adaptive Learning From Relevance Feedback Zhixiang Chen University of Texas−Pan American Binhai Zhu Montana State University Xiannong Meng Bucknell University Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. Abstract In this chapter, machine−learning approaches to real−time intelligent Web search are discussed. The goal is to build an intelligent Web search system that can find the users desired information with as little relevance feedback from the user as possible. The system can achieve a significant search precision increase with a small number of iterations of user relevance feedback. A new machine−learning algorithm is designed as the core of the intelligent search component. This algorithm is applied to three different search engines with different emphases. This chapter presents the algorithm, the architectures, and the performances of these search engines. Future research issues regarding real−time intelligent Web search are also discussed. Introduction This chapter presents the authors approaches to intelligent Web search systems that are built on top of existing search engine design and implementation techniques. An intelligent search engine would use the search results of the general purpose search engines as its starting search space, from which it would adaptively learn from the users feedback to boost and to enhance the search performance and accuracy. It may use feature extraction, document clustering and filtering, and other methods to help an adaptive learning process. The goal is to design practical and efficient algorithms by exploring the nature of the Web search. With these new algorithms, three intelligent Web search enginesWEBSAIL, YARROW and FEATURES are built that are able to achieve significant search precision increase with just four to five iterations of real−time learning from a users relevance feedback. The characteristics of those three intelligent search engines are reported in this chapter. Background Recently, three general approaches have been taken to increase Web search accuracy and performance. One is the development of meta−search engines that forward user queries to multiple search engines at the same time in order to increase the coverage and hope to include what the user wants in a short list of top−ranked 152 results. Examples of such meta−search engines include MetaCrawler (MC), Inference Find (IF), and Dogpile (DP). Another approach is the development of topic−specific search engines that are specialized in particular topics. These topics range from vacation guides (VG) to kids' health (KH). The third approach is to use some group or personal profiles to personalize the Web search. Examples of such efforts include GroupLens (Konstan et al., 1997), PHOAKS (Terveen, Hill, Amento, McDonald, & Creter, 1997), among others. The first generation meta−search engines address the problem of decreasing coverage by simultaneously querying multiple general−purpose engines. These meta−search engines suffer to certain extent the inherited problem of information overflow that it is difficult for users to pin down specific information for which they are searching. Specialized search engines typically contain much more accurate and narrowly focused information. However, it is not easy for a novice user to know where and which specialized engine to use. Most personalized Web search projects reported so far involve collecting users behavior at a centralized server or a proxy server. While it is effective for the purpose of e−commerce where vendors can collectively learn consumer behaviors, this approach does present the privacy problem. Users of the search engines would have to submit their search habits to some type of servers, though most likely the information collected is anonymous. The clustering, user profiling, and other advanced techniques used by these search engines and other projects (Bollacker, Lawrence, & Giles, 1998, 1999) are static in the sense that they are built before the search begins. They cannot be changed dynamically during the real−time search process. Thus, they do not reflect the changing interests of the user at different time, at different location or on different subjects. The static nature of the existing search engines makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to support the dynamic changes of the users search interests. The augmented features of personalization (or customization) certainly help a search engine to increase its search performance, however their ability is very limited. An intelligent search engine should be built on top of existing search engine design and implementation techniques. It should use the search results of the general−purpose search engines as its starting search space, from which it would adaptively learn in real−time from the users relevance feedback to boost and to enhance the search performance and the relevance accuracy. With the ability to perform real−time adaptive learning from relevance feedback, the search engine is able to learn the users search interest changes or shifts, and thus provides the user with improved search results. Relevance feedback is the most popular query reformation method in information retrieval ( Baeza−Yates & Ribeiro−Neto 1999, Salton 1975). It is essentially an adaptive learning process from the document examples judged by the user as relevant or irrelevant. It requires a sequence of iterations of relevance feedback to search for the desired documents. As it is known in (Salton, 1975), a single iteration of similarity−based relevance feedback usually produces improvements from 40 to 60 percent in the search precision, evaluated at certain fixed levels of the recall ,and averaged over a number of user queries. Some people might think that Web search users are not willing to try iterations of relevance feedback to search for their desired documents. However, the authors think otherwise. It is not a question of whether the Web search users are not willing to try iterations of relevance feedback to perform their search. Rather it is a question of whether an adaptive learning system can be built that supports high search precision increase with just a few iterations of relevance feedback. The Web search users may have no patience to try more than a dozen iterations of relevance feedback. But, if a system has a 20% or so search precision increase with just about four to five iterations of relevance feedback, are the users willing to use such a system? The authors believe that the answer is yes. Intelligent Web search systems that dynamically learn the users information needs in real−time must be built to advance the state of art in Web search. Machine−learning techniques can be used to improve Web search, because machine−learning algorithms are able to adjust the search process dynamically so as to satisfy the users information needs. Unfortunately, the existing machine−learning algorithms (e.g., Angluin, 1987; Littlestone, 1988), including the most popular similarity−based relevance feedback algorithm (Rocchio, 1971), suffer from the large number of iterations required to achieve the search goal. Average users are not willing to go through too many iterations of learning to find what they want. Chapter 9: Intelligent Web Search Through Adaptive Learning From Relevance Feedback 153 Web Search and Adaptive Learning Overview There have been great research efforts on applications of machine−learning to automatic extraction, clustering and classification of information from the Web. Some earlier research includes WebWatcher (Armstrong, Freitage, Joachims, & Mitchell, 1995) that interactively help users locate desired information by employing learned knowledge about which hyperlinks are likely to lead to the target information; Syskill and Webert (Pazzani, Muramatsu, & Billus, 1996), a system that uses a Bayesian classifier to learn about interesting Web pages for the user; and NewsWeeder (Lang, 1995), a news−filtering system that allows the users to rate each news article being read and learns a user profile based on those ratings. Some research is aimed at providing adaptive Web service through learning. For example, Ahoy! The Homepage Finder in (Shakes, Langheinrich, & Etzioni, 1997) performs dynamic reference shifting; Adaptive Web Sites in (Etzioni & Weld 1995, Perkowitz & Etzioni 2000) automatically improve their organization and presentation based on user access data; and Adaptive Web Page Recommendation Services (Balabanovi, 1997) recommends potentially interesting Web pages to the users. Since so much work has been done on intelligent Web search and on learning from the Web by many researchers, a comprehensive review is beyond the scope and the limited space of this chapter. Interested readers may find good surveys of the previous research on learning the Web in Kobayashi and Takeda (2000). Dynamic Features and Dynamic Vector Space In spite of the World Wide Webs size and the high dimensionality of Web document index features, the traditional vector space model in information retrieval (Baeza−Yates & Ribeiro−Neto,1999; Salton, 1989; Salton et al., 1975) has been used for Web document representation and search. However, to implement real−time adaptive learning with limited computing resource, the traditional vector space model cannot be applied directly. Recall that back in 1998, the AltaVista (AV) system was running on 20 multi−processor machines, all of them having more than 130 Giga−Bytes of RAM and over 500 Giga−Bytes of disk space (Baeza−Yates & Ribeiro−Neto,1999). A new model is needed that is efficient enough both in time and space for Web search implementations with limited computing resources. The new model may also be used to enhance the computing performance of a Web search system even if enough computing resources are available. Let us now examine indexing in Web search. In the discussion, keywords are used as document index features. Let X denote the set of all index keywords for the whole Web (or, practically, a portion of the whole Web). Given any Web document d, let I(d) denote the set of all index keywords in X that are used to index d with non−zero values. Then, the following two properties hold: The size of I(d) is substantially smaller than the size of X. Practically, I(d) can be bounded by a constant. The rationale behind this is that in the simplest case only a few of the keywords in d are needed to index it. • For any search process related to the search query q, let D(q) denote the collection of all the documents that match q, then the set of index keywords relevant to q, denoted by F(q), is Although the size of F(q) varies from different queries, it is still substantially smaller than the size of X, and might be bounded by a few hundreds or a few thousands in practice. • Web Search and Adaptive Learning 154 Definition 1. Given any search query q, F(q), which is given in the above paragraph, is defined as the set of dynamic features relevant to the search query q. Definition 2. Given any search query q, the dynamic vector space V(q) relevant to q is defined as the vector space that is constructed with all the documents in D(q) such that each of those documents is indexed by the dynamic features in F(q). The General Setting of Learning Lest be a Web search system.For any query q, S first finds the set of documents D(q) that match the query q. It finds D(q) with the help of a general−purpose search strategy through searching its internal database, or through external search engine such as AltaVista (AV) when no matches are found within its internal database. It then finds the set of dynamic features F(q), and later constructs the dynamic vector space V(q). Once D(q), F(q) and V(q) have been found, S starts its adaptive learning process with the help of the learning algorithm that is to be presented in the following subsections. More precisely, let } K denotes a dynamic feature (i.e., an index keyword). S maintains a common w = for dynamic features in F(q). The components of w have non−negative real values. The learning algorithm uses w to extract and learn the most relevant features and to classify documents in D(q) as relevant or irrelevant. weight vector ) Algorithm TW2 As the authors have investigated (Chen, Meng, & Fowler, 1999; Chen & Meng, Chen, Meng, Fowler, & Zhu, 2000), intelligent Web search can be modeled as an adaptive learning process such as adaptive learning, where the search engine acts as a learner and the user as a teacher. The user sends a query to the engine, and the engine uses the query to search the index database and returns a list of URLs that are ranked according to a ranking function. Then the user provides the engine relevance feedback, and the engine uses the feedback to improve its next search and returns a refined list of URLs. The learning (or search) process ends when the engine finds the desired documents for the user. Conceptually, a query entered by the user can be understood as the logical expression of the collection of the documents wanted by the user. A list of URLs returned by the engine can be interpreted as an approximation of the collection of the desired documents. Let us now consider how to use adaptive learning from equivalence queries to approach the problem of Web search. The vector space model (Baeza−Yates & Ribeiro−Neto, 1999; Salton, 1989; Salton et al., 1975) is used to represent documents. The vector space may consist of Boolean vectors. It may also consist of discretized vectors, for example, the frequency vector of the index keywords. A target concept is a collection of documents, which is equivalent to the set of vectors of the documents in the collection. The learner is the search engine and the teacher is the user. The goal of the search engine is to find the target concept in real−time with a minimal number of mistakes (or equivalence queries). The authors designed the algorithm TW2, a tailored version of Winnow2 (Littlestone 1988), which is described in the following. As described in the general setting of learning, for each query q entered by the user, algorithm TW2 uses a common weight vector w and a real−valued threshold q to classify documents in D(q). Initially, all weights in w have a value of 0. Let a > 1 be the promotion and demotion factor. Algorithm TW2 classifies documents whose vectors as relevant, and all others as irrelevant. If the user provides a document that contradicts the classification of TW2, then TW2 is said to have made a mistake. When the user responds with a document that may or may not contradict to the current classification, TW2 updates the weights through promotion or demotion. It should be noticed that in contrast to algorithm Winnow2 to set all initial weights in w to 1, algorithm TW2 sets all initial weights in w to 0 and has a different promotion strategy accordingly. Another substantial difference between TW2 and Winnow2 is that TW2 accepts document examples that may not contradict its current classification to promote or demote its weight The General Setting of Learning 155 vector, while Winnow2 only accepts examples that contradict its current classification to perform promotion or demotion. The rationale behind setting all the initial weights to 0 by algorithm TW2 is to focus attention on the propagation of the influence of the relevant documents, and to use irrelevant documents to adjust the focused search space. Moreover, this approach is computationally feasible because existing effective document−ranking mechanisms can be coupled with the learning process. In contrast to the linear lower bounds proved for Rocchios similarity−based relevance feedback algorithm (Chen & Zhu, 2002), algorithm TW2 has surprisingly small mistake bounds for learning any collection of documents represented by a disjunction of a small number of relevant features. The mistake bounds are independent of the dimensionality of the index features. For example, one can show that to learn a collection of documents represented by a disjunction of at most k relevant features (or index keywords) over the n−dimensional Boolean vector space, TW2 makes at most mistakes, where A is the number of dynamic features that occurred in the learning process. The actual implementation of algorithm TW2 requires the help of document ranking and equivalence query simulation that are to be addressed later. Feature Learning Algorithm FEX (Feature EXtraction) Given any user query q, for any dynamic feature ) Ki F(q) with 1 I n, define the rank of Ki as h(Ki) = ho(Ki) + wi. Here, ho(Ki) is the initial rank for Ki. Reacal that Ki is some index keyword. With the feature ranking function h and the common weight vector w, FEX extracts and learns the most relevant features as follows. Document Ranking Let g be a ranking function independent of TW2 and FEX. Define the ranking function f for documents in D(q ) for any user query q as follows. For any Web document d ∈ D(q) with vector d = (x1,,xn) ∈ V(q), define Feature Learning Algorithm FEX (Feature EXtraction) 156 Here, g remains constant for each document d during the learning process of the learning algorithm. Various strategies can be used to define g, for example, PageRank (Brin & Page, 1998), classical tf−idf scheme, vector spread, or cited−based rankings (Yuwono & Lee, 1996). The two additional tuning parameters are used to do individual document promotions or demotions of the documents that have been judged by the user. Initially, let ß(d) 0 and γ(d) = 1. ß(d) and γ (d) can be updated in a similar fashion as the weight value wi is updated by algorithm TW2. Equivalence Query Simulation Our system will use the ranking function f that was defined above to rank the documents in D(q) for each user query q, and for each iteration of leaning, it returns the top 10 ranked documents to the user. These top 10 ranked documents represent an approximation to the classification made by the learning algorithm that has been used by the system. The quantity 10 can be replaced by, say, 25 or 50. But it should not be too large for two reasons: (1) the user may only be interested in a very small number of top ranked documents, and (2) the display space for visualization is limited. The user can examine the short list of documents and can end the search process, or, if some documents are judged as misclassified, document relevance feedback can be provided. Sometimes, in addition to the top 10 ranked documents, the system may also provide the user with a short list of other documents below the top 10. Documents in the second short list may be selected randomly, or the bottom 10 ranked documents can be included. The motivation for the second list is to give the user some better view of the classification made by the learning algorithm. The Websail System and the Yarrow System The WEBSAIL System is a real−time adaptive Web search learner designed and implemented to show that the learning algorithm TW2 not only works in theory but also works practically. The detailed report of the system can be found in Chen et al. (2000c). WEBSAIL employs TW2 as its learning component and is able to help the user search for the desired documents with as little relevance feedback as possible. WEBSAIL has a graphic user interface to allow the user to enter his/her query and to specify the number of the top matched document URLs to be returned. WEBSAIL maintains an internal index database of about 800,000 documents. Each of those documents is indexed with about 300 keywords. It also has a meta−search component to query AltaVista whenever needed. When the user enters a query and starts a search process, WEBSAIL first searches its internal index database. If no relevant documents can be found within its database then it receives a list of top matched documents externally with the help of its meta−search component. WEBSAIL displays the search result to the user in a format as shown in Figure 1. Equivalence Query Simulation 157 Figure 1: The display format of WEBSAIL Also as shown in Figure 1, WEBSAIL provides at each iteration the top 10 and the bottom 10 ranked document URLs. Each document URL is preceded with two radio buttons for the user to judge whether the document is relevant to the search query or not. The document URLs are clickable for viewing the actual document contents so that the user can judge more accurately whether a document is relevant or not. After the user clicks a few radio buttons, he/she can click the feedback button to submit the feedback to TW2. WEBSAIL has a function to parse out the feedback provided by the user when the feedback button is clicked. Having received the feedback from the user, TW2 updates its common weight vector w and also performs individual document promotions or demotions. At the end of the current iteration of learning, WEBSAIL re−ranks the documents and displays the top 10 and the bottom10 document URLs to the user. At each iteration, the dispatcher of WEBSAIL parses query or relevance feedback information from the interface and decides which of the following components should be invoked to continue the search process: TW2, or Index Database Searcher, or Meta−Searcher. When meta−search is needed, Meta−Searcher is called to query AltaVista to receive a list of the top matched documents. The Meta−Searcher has a parser and an indexer that work in real−time to parse the received documents and to index each of them with at most 64 keywords. The received documents, once indexed, will also be cached in the index database. The following relative Recall and relative Precision are used to measure the performance of WEBSAIL. For any query q, the relative Recall and the relative Precision are where R is the total number of relevant documents among the set of the retrieved documents, and Rm is the number of relevant documents ranked among the top m positions in the final search result of the search engine. The authors have selected 100 queries to calculate the average relative Recall of WEBSAIL. Each query is represented by a collection of at most five keywords. For each query, WEBSAIL is tested with the returning document number m as 50, 100, 150, 200, respectively. For each test, the number of iterations used and the number of documents judged by the user were recorded. The relative Recall and Precision were calculated based on manual examination of the relevance of the returned documents. The experiments reveal that WEBSAIL achieves an average of 0.95 relative Recall and an average of 0.46 relative Precision with an average of 3.72 iterations and an average of 13.46 documents judged as relevance feedback. The Yarrow system (Chen & Meng, 2000) is a multi−threaded program. Its architecture differs from that of WEBSAIL in two aspects: (1) it replaces the meta−searcher of WEBSAIL with a generic Query Constructor and a group of meta−searchers, and it does not maintain its own internal index database. For each search process, it creates a thread and destroys the thread when the search process ends. Because of its light−weight Equivalence Query Simulation 158 size, it can be easily converted or ported to run in different environments or platforms. The predominant feature of YARROW, compared with existing meta−search engines, is the fact that it learns from the users feedback in real−time on client side. The learning algorithm TW2 used in YARROW has some surprisingly small mistake bound. YARROW may be well used as a plug−in component for Web browsers on client side. A detailed report of the Yarrow system is given in Chen and Meng (2000). The Features System The FEATURES system (Chen, Meng, Fowler, & Zhu, 2001) is also a multi−threaded system, and its architecture is shown in Figure 2. The key difference between FEATURES and WEBSAIL is that FEATURES employs the two learning algorithmsFEX and TW2to update the common weight vector w concurrently. Figure 2: The architecture of FEATURES For each query, FEATURES usually shows the top 10 ranked documents, plus the top 10 ranked features, to the user for him/her to judge document relevance and feature relevance. The format of presenting the top 10 ranked documents together with the top 10 ranked features is shown in Figure 3. In this format, document URLs and features are preceded by radio buttons for the user to indicate whether they are relevant or not. Figure 3: The display format of FEATURES If the current task is a learning process from the users document and feature relevance feedback, Dispatcher sends the feature relevance feedback information to the feature learner FEX and the document relevance feedback information to the document learner TW2. FEX uses the relevant and irrelevant features as judged The Features System 159 by the user to promote and demote the related feature weights in the common weight vector w. TW2 uses the relevant and irrelevant documents judged by the user as positive and negative examples to promote and demote the weight vector. Once FEX and TW2 have finished promotions and demotions, the updated weight vector w is sent to Query Searcher and to Feature Ranker. Feature Ranker re−ranks all the dynamic features, that are then sent to Html Constructor. Query Searcher searches Index Database to find the matched documents that are then sent to Document Ranker. Document Ranker re−ranks the matched documents and then sends them to Html Constructor to select documents and features to be displayed. Empirical results (Chen et al., 2001) show that FEATURES has substantially better search performance than AltaVista. Timing Statistics On December 13th and 14th of 2001, the authors conducted the experiments to collect the timing statistics for using WEBSAIL, YARROW and FEATURES. Thirty (30) query words were used to test each of these meta−search engines. Every time a query was sent, the wall−clock time needed for the meta−search engine to list the sorted result was recorded in the program. Also recorded was the wall−clock time to refine the search results based on the users feedback. Since YARROW supports multiple external search engines, ALTAVISTA and NORTHERN LIGHT were selected as the external search engines when YARROW was tested. The external search engine used by WEBSAIL and FEATURES is ALTAVISTA. The following tables show the statistical results at 95% confidence interval level. The original responding time is torig and the refining time is trefine, and C.I. denotes the confidence interval. Table 1: Response time of WEBSAIL (in seconds) Table 2: Response Time of YARROW (in seconds) Table 3: Response time of FEATURES (in seconds) The statistics from the table indicate that while the standard deviations and the confidence intervals are relatively high, they are in a reasonable range that users can accept. It takes WEBSAIL, YARROW and FEATURES in the order of a few seconds to 20 seconds to respond initially because they need to get the information from external search engines over the network. However, even for the initial response time is not long and hence is acceptable by the user. Timing Statistics 160 The Commercial Applications Intelligent Web search can find many commercial applications. This section will concentrate on the applications to E−commerce. E−commerce can be viewed as three major components, the service and goods suppliers, the consumers, and the information intermediaries (or infomediaries). The service and goods suppliers are the producer or the source of the e−commerce flow. The consumers are the destination of the flow. Informediaries, according to Grover and Teng (2001), are an essential part of E−commerce. An enormous amount of information has to be produced, analyzed and managed in order for e−commerce to succeed. In this context, Web search is a major player in the infomediaries. Other components of infomediaries include communities of interest (e.g., online purchase), industry magnet sites (e.g., www.amazon.com), e−retailers, or even individual corporate sites (Grover & Teng, 2001). The machine−learning approaches in Web search studied in this chapter are particularly important in the whole context of E−commerce. The key feature of the machine−learning approach for Web search is interactive learning and narrowing the search results to what the user wants. This feature can be used in many e−commerce applications. The following are a few examples. Building a partnership: As pointed out in Tewari et al. (2001), building a partnership between the buyers and the seller is extremely important for the success of an e−Business. Tewari et al. used Multi−Attribute Resource Intermediaries (MARI) infrastructure to approximate buyer and seller preferences. They compare the degree of matching between buyers and sellers by computing a distance between the two vectors. When interactive learning features explored in this chapter are used in this process, the buyers and the sellers can negotiate the deal in real−time, thus greatly enhancing the capability of the system. A collection of sellers may provide an initial list of items available at certain prices for buyers to choose. The buyers may also have a list of expectations. According to the model proposed in (Tewari et.al, the possibility of a match is computed statically. If a machine−learning approach is taken, the buyers and the sellers may interactively find a best deal, similar to the situation where a face−to−face negotiation is taking place. Brokering between buyers and sellers: Brokerage between the producers and the consumers is a critical E−commerce component. Given a large number of producers and a large number of consumers, how to efficiently find a match between what is offered on the market and what a buyer is looking for? The work described in Meyyappan (2001) and, Santos et al. (2001) provided a framework for e−commerce search brokers. A broker here is to compare price information, product features, the reputation of the producer, and other information for a potential buyer. While in the previous category the seller and the buyer may negotiate interactively. Here the buyer interacts with the broker(s) only, very similar to the real−world situation. The interactive machine−learning and related Web search technology can be applied in this category as well. The machine−learning algorithm will use the collection of potential sellers as a starting space, interactively search the optimal seller for the user based on the information collected by the brokerage software. (Meyyappan 2001) and (Santos et.al. 2001) provided a framework for this brokerage to take place. The machine−learning algorithm discussed in this chapter can be used for a buyer to interact with the broker to get the best that is available on the market. For example, a broker may act as a meta−search engine that collects information from a number of sellers, behaving very much like general−purpose search engines. A buyer asks her broker to get certain information; the broker, which is a meta−search engine equipped with TW2 or other learning algorithms may search, collect, collate and rank the information returned from seller sources to the buyer. The buyer can interact with the broker, just as if in the scenario of Web search. The broker will refine its list until the buyer finds a satisfactory product and the seller. Interactive catalog: The service providers or the sellers can allow consumers to browse the catalog interactively. While browsing the learning algorithm can pick up users' interests and supply better information to the customer, much like what adaptive Web sites (Perkowitz & Etzioni, 2000) do for the customers. Here the learning can take place in two forms. The seller can explicitly ask how the potential buyers (browsers of The Commercial Applications 161 [...]... solutions to a large array of problems will be proposed and applied The chapter offers, but is not limited to, solutions for different problems that arise in retrieval of multimedia data A list of important open problems is identified at the end of the chapter Introduction Multimedia data plays an essential role in todays e business applications Indeed, a large array of e business applications relies... Knowledge and Information Systems 1, 369−3 75 Chen, Z., Meng, X., Fowler, R H., & Zhu, B (2001) FEATURES: Real time adaptive features and document learning for Web search Journal for the American Society for Information Science, 52 (8), 655 6 65 Chen, Z., & Zhu, B (2002) Some formal analysis of the Rocchios similarity−based relevance feedback algorithm Information Retrieval, 5( 1), 61−86 Chen, Z., Meng, X., Zhu,... agents in next−generation electronic markets In Proceedings of the 2001 International Internet Computing Conference, pp 247− 253 Yuwono, B., & Lee, D (1996) Search and ranking algorithms for locating resources on the World Wide Web In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering, 164−171 1 65 Chapter 10: World Wide Web Search Engines Wen−Chen Hu University of North Dakota Jyh−Haw Yeh... of which only a small fraction are relevant to the users needs Furthermore, the most relevant documents do not necessarily appear at the top of the query output list A number of corporations and research organizations are taking a variety of approaches to try to solve these problems These approaches are diverse, and none of them dominate the field This chapter provides a survey and classification of. .. of Web Search Engines It is first necessary to examine what kind of features a Web search engine is expected to have in order to conduct effective and efficient Web searches and what kind of challenges may be faced in the process of developing new Web search techniques The requirements for a Web search engine are listed below, in order of importance: 1 effective and efficient location and ranking of. .. page being to which it points This approach is based on identifying two important types of Web pages for a given topic: • Authorities, which provide the best source of information on the topic, and • Hubs, which provide collections of links to authorities For the example of professional basketball information, the official National Basketball Association site (http://www.nba.com/) is considered to be... to allow for the wide range of new types of data that are now available on the World Wide Web, including audio, video, graphics, and images, the use of hypermedia was introduced to extend the capabilities of hypertext The first Internet search engine, Archie, was created in 1990; however, it was not until the introduction of multimedia to the browser Mosaic that the number of Internet documents began... Knowledge and Data Engineering, 8(4) :54 8 55 4 Zamir, O., and O Etzioni (1998) Web document clustering: A feasibility demonstration In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 46 54 , Melbourne, Australia Zhang, D., & Dong, Y., (2000) An efficient algorithm to rank Web resources In Proceedings of the 9th International World Wide Web... Chapter 11: Retrieval of Multimedia Data on the Web: An Architectural Framework Mohammed Moharrum Stephan Olariu, and Hussein Abdel−Wahab Old Dominion University Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc is prohibited Abstract The objective of this chapter is to introduce the reader to a general architectural framework... framework has the three main objectives of (1) proposing a layered architecture to facilitated design and separate different issues, (2) covering a large number of multimedia applications, and finally, (3) making use of existing and well−established technology, such as Mobile Agents, SQL databases, and cache managements schemes The proposed architectural framework separates issues involved in multimedia retrieval . Information Science, 52 (8), 655 6 65. Chen, Z., & Zhu, B. (2002). Some formal analysis of the Rocchios similarity−based relevance feedback algorithm. Information Retrieval, 5( 1), 61−86. Chen,. also consist of discretized vectors, for example, the frequency vector of the index keywords. A target concept is a collection of documents, which is equivalent to the set of vectors of the documents. for learning any collection of documents represented by a disjunction of a small number of relevant features. The mistake bounds are independent of the dimensionality of the index features. For