I’m currently doing a postdoc in GIS-Geocomputation unit, Departement of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland. I’m working on geographic information retrieval field.
Abstract: In an information retrieval (IR) context, users usually submit queries with few terms and no operators (e.g., and, or, +). However, most of users' information needs involve more expressiveness (e.g., `Potato famine in Ireland, but not in Cork'). Our work deals with this category of queries that may be processed by geographic IR (GIR) systems to parse digital libraries according to spatial, temporal and topical criteria. We propose a GIR framework that supports expressive queries and aggregates results of a multi-criteria search. We also make experiments to verify that this approach improves the effectiveness of such search engines (improvement of 27% for topical criteria only, and of 54% for spatial and temporal criteria).
Abstract: Search engines allow users to retrieve documents with respect to a given query. These provide advanced search options, such as query operators (e.g., +term, term^10). Previous work studied how query operators are employed by end-users. In this paper, we study the extent to which using query operators may lead to improved results, regardless of specific users. We hypothesize that the proper use of query operators improves search results. To validate this hypothesis, we present a methodology relying on standard IR test collections. We applied this methodology to TREC-7 and TREC-8 test collections with five IR models implemented in the Terrier search engine. Experiments show that queries enriched with operators give an improvement in effectiveness up to 35.1% over regular queries. This result suggests that end-users would benefit from using operators more often
Abstract: Common search engines process usersâ queries (i.e., information needs) by retrieving documents from pre-built term-based indexes. For digital libraries, such approaches are limited regarding particular contexts, such as specialized collections (e.g., cultural heritage collections) or specific retrieval criteria (e.g., multidimensional criteria). In this paper, we consider Information Retrieval systems exploiting geographic dimensions: spatial, temporal, and topical dimensions. Our contribution is twofold as we propose a Geographic Information Retrieval system evaluation framework and test the following hypothesis: combining spatial and temporal dimensions along with the topical dimension improves the effectiveness of Information Retrieval systems.
