Mounia Lalmas - Böcker

There have been several recent attempts to define a logic for information retrieval (IR). The aim was to provide a rich and uniform representation of information and its semantics with the goal of improving retrieval effectiveness. The basis of a logical model for IR is the assumption that queries and documents can be represented effectively by logical formulae. To retrieve a document, an IR system has to infer the formula representing the query from the formula representing the document. This logical interpretation of query and document emphasizes that relevance in IR is an inference process. The use of logic to build IR models enables one to obtain models that are more general than earlier well-known IR models. Indeed, some logical models are able to represent within a uniform framework various features of IR systems such as hypermedia links, multimedia data, and user's knowledge. Logic also provides a common approach to the integration of IR systems with logical database systems. Finally, logic makes it possible to reason about an IR model and its properties.This latter possibility is becoming increasingly more important since conventional evaluation methods, although good indicators of the effectiveness of IR systems, often give results which cannot be predicted, or for that matter satisfactorily explained. However, logic by itself cannot fully model IR. The success or the failure of the inference of the query formula from the document formula is not enough to model relevance in IR. It is necessary to take into account the uncertainty inherent in such an inference process. In 1986, the author of this text, Van Rijsbergen, proposed the uncertainty logical principle to model relevance as an uncertain inference process. When proposing the principle, Van Rijsbergen was not specific about which logic and which uncertainty theory to use. As a consequence, various logics and uncertainty theories have been proposed and investigated. The choice of an appropriate logic and uncertainty mechanism has been a main research theme in logical IR modelling leading to a number of logical IR models over the years. The work contains a collection of papers proposing, developing and implementing logical IR models.It should be appropriate for use as a text for a graduate-level course on information retrieval or database systems, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

In recent years, there have been several attempts to define a logic for information retrieval (IR). The aim was to provide a rich and uniform representation of information and its semantics with the goal of improving retrieval effectiveness. The basis of a logical model for IR is the assumption that queries and documents can be represented effectively by logical formulae. To retrieve a document, an IR system has to infer the formula representing the query from the formula representing the document. This logical interpretation of query and document emphasizes that relevance in IR is an inference process. The use of logic to build IR models enables one to obtain models that are more general than earlier well-known IR models. Indeed, some logical models are able to represent within a uniform framework various features of IR systems such as hypermedia links, multimedia data, and user's knowledge. Logic also provides a common approach to the integration of IR systems with logical database systems. Finally, logic makes it possible to reason about an IR model and its properties. This latter possibility is becoming increasingly more important since conventional evaluation methods, although good indicators of the effectiveness of IR systems, often give results which cannot be predicted, or for that matter satisfactorily explained. However, logic by itself cannot fully model IR. The success or the failure of the inference of the query formula from the document formula is not enough to model relevance in IR. It is necessary to take into account the uncertainty inherent in such an inference process. In 1986, Van Rijsbergen proposed the uncertainty logical principle to model relevance as an uncertain inference process. When proposing the principle, Van Rijsbergen was not specific about which logic and which uncertainty theory to use. As a consequence, various logics and uncertainty theories have been proposed and investigated. The choice of an appropriate logic and uncertainty mechanism has been a main research theme in logical IR modeling leading to a number of logical IR models over the years. Information Retrieval: Uncertainty and Logics contains a collection of exciting papers proposing, developing and implementing logical IR models. This book is appropriate for use as a text for a graduate-level course on Information Retrieval or Database Systems, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

User engagement refers to the quality of the user experience that emphasizes the positive aspects of interacting with an online application and, in particular, the desire to use that application longer and repeatedly.

The ultimate goal of many information access systems (e.g., digital libraries, the Web, intranets) is to provide the right content to their end-users. This content is increasingly a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, and is formatted according to the adopted –W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup L- guage (XML). Whereas many of today’s information access systems still treat do- ments as single large (text) blocks, XML offers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access thus providing more specific answers to user requests. Providing effective access to XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. The aim of the INEX campaign (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval), which was set up at the beginning of 2002, is to establish infrastructures, XML test suites, and appropriate measurements for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems that aim at giving effective access to XML content. More precisely, the goal of the INEX initiative is to provide means, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented XML retrieval systems.

th These proceedings contain the refereed papers and posters presented at the 28 Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2006), which was held at Imperial College London in South Kensington between April 10 and 12, 2006. ECIR is the annual conference of the British Computer Society’s Inf- mation Retrieval Specialist Group. The event started its life as a colloquium in 1978 and was held in the UK each year until 1998, when the event took place in Grenoble, France. Since then the venue has alternated between the UK and Continental Europe. In the last decade ECIR has grown to become the major Europeanforumforthediscussionofresearchinthe?eldofinformationretrieval. ECIR 2006 received 177 paper and 73 poster submissions, largely from the UK (18%) and Continental Europe (50%), but we had many sub- missions from furthera?eldincludingAmerica(7%),Asia(21%),Middle EastandAfrica(2%), and Australasia (2%). In total 37 papers and 28 posters were accepted, and two papers were converted to posters. All contributions were reviewed by at least three reviewers in a double anonymous process and then ranked during a ProgrammeCommittee meeting with respectto scienti?c quality andoriginality. It is a good and healthy sign for information retrieval in general, and ECIR in particular, that the submission rate has more than doubled over the past three years. The downside, of course, is that many high-quality submissions had to be rejected owing to a limited capacity of the conference.

Content-oriented XML retrieval has been receiving increasing interest due to the widespread use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is becoming a standard document format on the Web, in digital libraries,and publishing. By exploiting the enriched source of syntactic and semantic information that XML markup provides, XML information retrieval (IR) systems aim to implement a more focused retrieval strategy and return document components, so-called XML elements – instead of complete documents – in response to a user query. This focused retrieval approach is of particular bene?t for collections containing long documents or documents covering a wide variety of topics (e.g., books, user manuals, legal documents, etc.), where users’ e?ort to locate relevant content can be reduced by directing them to the most relevant parts of the documents. Implementing this, more focused, retrieval paradigm means that an XML IR system needs not only to ?nd relevant information in the XML documents, but it also has to determine the appropriate level of granularity to be returned to the user. In addition, the relevance of a retrieved component may be dependent on meeting both content and structural query conditions.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2006, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2006. The papers are organized in topical sections on methodology and seven additional tracks on ad-hoc, natural language processing, heterogeneous collection, multimedia, interactive, use case, as well as document mining.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2007, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2007. The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation at the workshop from 50 initial submissions. The papers are organized in an ad hoc track and 6 topical sections on book search, XML-mining, entity ranking, interactive, link-the-wiki, and multimedia.

In the 14 years since its ?rst edition back in 1997, the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) has become the reference meeting for an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners whose professional activities revolve around the theme of d- th ital libraries. This volume contains the proceedings of ECDL 2010, the 14 conference in this series, which, following Pisa (1997), Heraklion (1998), Paris (1999),Lisbon(2000),Darmstadt(2001),Rome(2002),Trondheim(2003),Bath (2004), Vienna (2005), Alicante (2006), Budapest (2007), Aarhus (2008), and Corfu (2009), was held in Glasgow, UK, during September 6–10, 2010. th Asidefrombeingthe14 edition of ECDL, this was also the last, at least with this name since starting with 2011, ECDL will be renamed (so as to avoid acronym con?icts with the European Computer Driving Licence) to TPLD, standing for the Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. We hope you all will join us for TPDL 2011 in Berlin! For ECDL 2010 separate calls for papers, posters and demos were issued, - sulting in the submission to the conference of 102 full papers, 40 posters and 13 demos. This year, for the full papers, ECDL experimented with a novel, two-tier reviewing model, with the aim of further improving the quality of the resu- ing program. A ?rst-tier Program Committee of 87 members was formed, and a further Senior Program Committee composed of 15 senior members of the DL community was set up.