Discovering hyponym relations among domain-specific terms is a fundamental task in taxonomy learning and knowledge acquisition. However, the great diversity of various domain corpora and the lack of labeled training sets make this task very challenging for conventional methods that are based on text content. The hyperlink structure of Wikipedia article pages was found to contain recurring network motifs in this study, indicating the probability of a hyperlink being a hyponym hyperlink. Hence, a novel hyponym relation extraction approach based on the network motifs of Wikipedia hyperlinks was proposed. This approach automatically constructs motif-based features from the hyperlink structure of a domain; every hyperlink is mapped to a 13-dimensional feature vector based on the 13 types of three-node motifs. The approach extracts structural information from Wikipedia and heuristically creates a labeled training set. Classification models were determined from the training sets for hyponym relation extraction. Two experiments were conducted to validate our approach based on seven domain-specific datasets obtained from Wikipedia. The first experiment, which utilized manually labeled data, verified the effectiveness of the motif-based features. The second experiment, which utilized an automatically labeled training set of different domains, showed that the proposed approach performs better than the approach based on lexico-syntactic patterns and achieves comparable result to the approach based on textual features. Experimental results show the practicability and fairly good domain scalability of the proposed approach.

Ranking is a core problem for information retrieval since the performance of the search system is directly impacted by the accuracy of ranking results. Ranking model construction has been the focus of both the fields of information retrieval and machine learning, and learning to rank in particular has attracted much interest. Many ranking models have been proposed, for example, RankSVM is a state-of-the-art method for learning to rank and has been empirically demonstrated to be effective. However, most of the proposed methods do not consider about the significant differences between queries, only resort to a single function in ranking. In this paper, we present a novel ranking model named QoRank, which performs the learning task dependent on queries. We also propose a LSE (least-squares estimation) -based weighted method to aggregate the ranking lists produced by base decision functions as the final ranking. Comparison of QoRank with other ranking techniques is conducted, and several evaluation criteria are employed to evaluate its performance. Experimental results on the LETOR OHSUMED data set show that QoRank strikes a good balance of accuracy and complexity, and outperforms the baseline methods. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Community detection is an important task for mining the structure and function of complex networks. Many pervious approaches are difficult to detect communities with arbitrary size and shape, and are unable to identify hubs and outliers. A recently proposed network clustering algorithm, SCAN, is effective and can overcome this difficulty. However, it depends on a sensitive parameter: minimum similarity threshold ε, but provides no automated way to find it. In this paper, we propose a novel density-based network clustering algorithm, called gSkeletonClu (graph-skeleton based clustering). By projecting a network to its Core-Connected Maximal Spanning Tree (CCMST), the network clustering problem is converted to finding core-connected components in the CCMST. We discover that all possible values of the parameter ε lie in the edge weights of the corresponding CCMST. By means of tree divisive or agglomerative clustering, our algorithm can find the optimal parameter ε and detect communities, hubs and outliers in large-scale undirected networks automatically without any user interaction. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic networks demonstrate the superior performance of gSkeletonClu over the baseline methods.

Ranking is a central problem for information retrieval systems, because the performance of an information retrieval system is mainly evaluated by the effectiveness of its ranking results. Learning to rank has received much attention in recent years due to its importance in information retrieval. This paper focuses on learning to rank in document retrieval and presents a ranking model named OrdRank that ranks documents with ordered multiple hyperplanes. Comparison of OrdRank with other state-of-the-art ranking techniques is conducted and several evaluation criteria are employed to evaluate its performance. Experimental results on the OHSUMED dataset show that OrdRank outperforms other methods, both in terms of quality of ranking results and efficiency.

This study proposes a novel method to group and organize search results. We apply statistical techniques to term co-occurrence information in a corpus to retrieve bi-grams firstly, and then combine bi-grams into n-grams. After eliminating redundant n-grams, the remaining ones are ranked and selected as cluster labels. Base clusters are constructed according to these cluster labels and then agglomerated into higher-level clusters. We refer to the proposed algorithm as CoHC (co-occurrence based hierarchical clustering). we compare CoHC with three other search results clustering (SRC) algorithms: suffix tree clustering (STC), Lingo, and Vivisimo. We also analyze the properties of cluster labels produced by different SRC algorithms. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the other three SRC algorithms, and is helpful to the user for browsing and locating the results of interest.

The XML-based meta-retrieval described in this paper is an integrated retrieval over multiple academic data sources on the premise that each data source has one web interface visible in the Internet environment. The goal of this model is to present an integrated retrieval interface in the Internet, to offer transparent accessing by formulating new queries suitable for heterogeneous data sources based on three adaptation rules, and to return the consolidated data results retrieved from multiple data sources. Technologies like eXtensible Markup Language(XML) and eXtensible Stylesheet Language Family(XSL) are used to facilitate the fulfillment of the goal. Experiment results prove that the model solve the heterogeneity of the data sources and provide transparent accessing for the end users.