More Like this

1. A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3449078  

   Vincent, Nicholas ; Hecht, Brent ( April 2021 , Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia's volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. In this paper, we report the results of an investigation into the incidence of Wikipedia links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Our results extend prior work by considering three U.S. search engines, simulating both mobile and desktop devices, and using a spatial analysis approach designed to study modern SERPs that are no longer just "ten blue links". We find that Wikipedia links are extremely common in important search contexts, appearing in 67-84% of desktop SERPs for common and trending queries, but less often for medical queries. Furthermore, we observe that Wikipedia links often appear in "Knowledge Panel" SERP elements and are in positions visible to users without scrolling, although Wikipedia appears less often and in less prominent positions on mobile devices. Our findings reinforce the complementary notions that (1) Wikipedia content and research has major impact outside of the Wikipedia domain and (2) powerful technologies like search engines are highly reliant on free content created by volunteers. 

   more » « less
2. Leveraging Schema Labels to Enhance Dataset Search

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45439-5_18  

   Chen, Zhiyu ; Jia, Haiyan ; Heflin, Jeff ; Davison, Brian D. ( January 2020 , 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval, LNCS)

   A search engine's ability to retrieve desirable datasets is important for data sharing and reuse. Existing dataset search engines typically rely on matching queries to dataset descriptions. However, a user may not have enough prior knowledge to write a query using terms that match with description text. We propose a novel schema label generation model which generates possible schema labels based on dataset table content. We incorporate the generated schema labels into a mixed ranking model which not only considers the relevance between the query and dataset metadata but also the similarity between the query and generated schema labels. To evaluate our method on real-world datasets, we create a new benchmark specifically for the dataset retrieval task. Experiments show that our approach can effectively improve the precision and NDCG scores of the dataset retrieval task compared with baseline methods. We also test on a collection of Wikipedia tables to show that the features generated from schema labels can improve the unsupervised and supervised web table retrieval task as well. 

   more » « less
3. Temporal Geo-Social Personalized Keyword Search Over Streaming Data

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3473006  

   Almaslukh, Abdulaziz ; Kang, Yunfan ; Magdy, Amr ( December 2021 , ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems)

   The unprecedented rise of social media platforms, combined with location-aware technologies, has led to continuously producing a significant amount of geo-social data that flows as a user-generated data stream. This data has been exploited in several important use cases in various application domains. This article supports geo-social personalized queries in streaming data environments. We define temporal geo-social queries that provide users with real-time personalized answers based on their social graph. The new queries allow incorporating keyword search to get personalized results that are relevant to certain topics. To efficiently support these queries, we propose an indexing framework that provides lightweight and effective real-time indexing to digest geo-social data in real time. The framework distinguishes highly dynamic data from relatively stable data and uses appropriate data structures and a storage tier for each. Based on this framework, we propose a novel geo-social index and adopt two baseline indexes to support the addressed queries. The query processor then employs different types of pruning to efficiently access the index content and provide a real-time query response. The extensive experimental evaluation based on real datasets has shown the superiority of our proposed techniques to index real-time data and provide low-latency queries compared to existing competitors.

    

   more » « less
4. Fast Bag-Of-Words Candidate Selection in Content-Based Instance Retrieval Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2018.8621935  

   Siedlaczek, Michal ; Wang, Qi ; Chen, Yen-Yu ; Suel, Torsten ( December 2018 , 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data)

   Many content-based image search and instance retrieval systems implement bag-of-visual-words strategies for candidate selection. Visual processing of an image results in hundreds of visual words that make up a document, and these words are used to build an inverted index. Query processing then consists of an initial candidate selection phase that queries the inverted index, followed by more complex reranking of the candidates using various image features. The initial phase typically uses disjunctive top-k query processing algorithms originally proposed for searching text collections. Our objective in this paper is to optimize the performance of disjunctive top-k computation for candidate selection in content-based instance retrieval systems. While there has been extensive previous work on optimizing this phase for textual search engines, we are unaware of any published work that studies this problem for instance retrieval, where both index and query data are quite different from the distributions commonly found and exploited in the textual case. Using data from a commercial large-scale instance retrieval system, we address this challenge in three steps. First, we analyze the quantitative properties of index structures and queries in the system, and discuss how they differ from the case of text retrieval. Second, we describe an optimized term-at-a-time retrieval strategy that significantly outperforms baseline term-at-a-time and document-at-a-time strategies, achieving up to 66% speed-up over the most efficient baseline. Finally, we show that due to the different properties of the data, several common safe and unsafe early termination techniques from the literature fail to provide any significant performance benefits. 

   more » « less
5. Investigating User Perceptions of Conversational Agents for Software-related Exploratory Web Search

   Frazier, M. ; Kumar, S. ; Damevski, K. ; Pollock, L. ( January 2022 , Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) NIER Track)

   Conversational agents that respond to user information requests through a natural conversation have the potential to revolutionize how we acquire new information on the Web (i.e., perform exploratory Web searches). Recent advances to conversational search agents use popular Web search engines as a back-end and sophisticated AI algorithms to maintain context, automatically generate search queries, and summarize results into utterances. While showing impressive results on general topics, the potential of this technology for software engineering is unclear. In this paper, we study the potential of conversational search agents to aid software developers as they acquire new knowledge. We also obtain user perceptions of how far the most recent generation of such systems (e.g., Facebook's BlenderBot2) has come in its ability to serve software developers. Our study indicates that users find conversational agents helpful in gaining useful information for software-related exploratory search; however, their perceptions also indicate a large gap between expectations and current state of the art tools, especially in providing high-quality information. Participant responses provide directions for future work. 

   more » « less