UPRM Computing Systems Research Group Prof. Bienvenido Vélez-Rivera – Leader José Enseñat – Graduate student Juan Torres – Undergraduate student University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus PRECISE Project Mayagüez, October 07, 2000

Problem Statement

Query-based Web Search large result-set short query BUT - queries hard to write -sequential access to result set inadequate

Proposed Solution

Inforadar’s Interactive query hierarchies seed query result set for selected query dynamic categories are queries selected query

Inforadar’s Interactive query hierarchies colors indicate node status level 2 categories icons mark documents read or in-basket

Theoretical Formulation

(a) low information loss high redundancy Coverage-based Category Evaluation Metric Goal: Avoid Redundancy and Information Loss q q2q2 q1q1 (b) high information loss low redundancy (c) better Ideal: Select categories that best approximate a partition But: This is an NP-complete problem seed

CTS: A greedy approximation algorithm for category selection Approach: CTS picks term f i maximizing: C = set of documents covered by previously selected terms winning category! low coverage high redundancy Goal: Pick best term among { t 1, t 2, t 3 } C D(q ^ t 3 ) D(q ^ t 2 ) D(q ^ t 1 ) D(q)

Experimental Plan InforadarImplement Inforadar site indexing ALL website data at UPRM InforadarMake Inforadar the official search engine for the UPRM web site Conduct usability study Analyze real user feedback Incorporate feedback into an improved design

References Query Lookahead for Query-Based Document Categorization. –Ph.D. Thesis –Massachusetts Institute of Technology –September 1999 Fast and Effective Query Refinement –Bienvenido Vélez, Ron Weiss, Mark Sheldon and David K. Gifford –ACM Conference in Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 97) HyPursuit: A network search engine exploiting concent-link similarity –R. Weiss, B. Vélez, M. Sheldon, C. Namprempre, P. Szilagy and D. K. Gifford.. –ACM Conference on Hypertext (HyperText 96)