Updating collection representations for federated search

Shokouhi, M., Baillie, M. and Azzopardi, L. (2007) Updating collection representations for federated search. In: Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 23-27 July 2007, pp. 511-518. ISBN 9781595935977 (doi: 10.1145/1277741.1277829)

Abstract

To facilitate the search for relevant information across a set of online distributed collections, a federated information retrieval system typically represents each collection, centrally, by a set of vocabularies or sampled documents. Accurate retrieval is therefore related to how precise each representation reflects the underlying content stored in that collection. As collections evolve over time, collection representations should also be updated to reflect any change, however, a current solution has not yet been proposed. In this study we examine both the implications of out-of-date representation sets on retrieval accuracy, as well as proposing three different policies for managing necessary updates. Each policy is evaluated on a testbed of forty-four dynamic collections over an eight-week period. Our findings show that out-of-date representations significantly degrade performance overtime, however, adopting a suitable update policy can minimise this problem.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: © ACM, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1277741.1277829
• Keywords: Federated search, distributed information retrieval, collection selection.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Azzopardi, Dr Leif
• Authors: Shokouhi, M., Baillie, M., and Azzopardi, L.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Publisher: ACM
• ISBN: 9781595935977
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2007 ACM
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.