Probabilistic and link-based Methods for Exploiting Very Large Textual Repositories

这项研究项目解决了人们在网络上提问的方式与现有的最先进搜索引擎界面之间的脱节。搜索引擎要求在线搜索者用特殊的查询语言表达他们的请求，这些语言的语法不自然，典型用户很难学习。此外，现有搜索引擎在返回不包含用户给出的任何术语但被检索为与用户的信息需求相关的文档方面出了名的差。这项工作主要集中在两个领域：(1)Web访问的问题到查询的概率转换(查询调制)和(2)Web链接上的内容传输模型。对于(1)的方法涉及设计和评估用于自然语言查询到特定搜索引擎的语言的自动、基于规则的转换的算法和系统。第(2)部分通过从其他相关文档到相关Web文档的链接方便了相关Web文档的检索。这个项目的预期结果和影响有三个方面：(1)更好地理解Web环境中文档检索和问答之间的相互作用，(2)更好地描述文档相关性如何在Web超图上传输，以及(3)更好的自然语言访问Web的算法，这将使数百万Web用户更容易以及时、准确和直观的方式找到他们需要的信息。根据这笔赠款开发的所有发现和人工制品将被广泛传播并纳入公共领域搜索引擎，结果将通过项目网站(http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair).)获得

This research project addresses the disconnect between the way in which humans ask questions on the Web and the existing interfaces to the state-of-the-art search engines. Search engines require online searchers to formulate their requests in idiosyncratic query languages whose syntax is unnatural and hard to learn by typical users. Furthermore, existing search engines are notoriously bad at returning documents which do not contain any of the terms given by the user and yet which were retrieved as relevant to the user's information need. The proposed work focuses on two areas of research: (1) probabilistic question-to-query transformation (query modulation) for Web access and (2) models of content transfer over web links. The approach for (1) involves designing and evaluating algorithms and systems for automatic, rule-based conversion of natural language queries to the language of specific search engines. Part (2) facilitates retrieval of relevant Web documents by virtue of the links from other relevant documents to them. The expected outcomes and impact of this project are threefold: (1) a better understanding of the interaction between document retrieval and question-answering in a Web environment, (2) better models describing how document relevance is transferred over the Web hypergraph, and (3) better algorithms for natural language access to the Web which will make it easier for millions of web users to find information that they need in a timely, accurate, and intuitive way. All findings and artifacts developed under this grant will be widely disseminated and incorporate into a public-domain search engine, and the results will be accessible via the project Web site (http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair).