Bandit Algorithms In Information Retrieval

This monograph provides an overview of bandit algorithms inspired by various aspects of Information Retrieval. It is accessible to anyone who has completed introductory to intermediate level courses in machine learning and/or statistics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th Russian Summer School on Information Retrieval, RuSSIR 2014, held in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, in August 2014. The volume includes 6 tutorial papers, summarizing lectures given at the event, and 8 revised papers from the school participants.The papers focus on various aspects of information retrieval.

The three volume set LNCS 8226, LNCS 8227 and LNCS 8228 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2013, held in Daegu, Korea, in November 2013. The 180 full and 75 poster papers presented together with 4 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. These papers cover all major topics of theoretical research, empirical study and applications of neural information processing research. The specific topics covered are as follows: cognitive science and artificial intelligence; learning theory, algorithms and architectures; computational neuroscience and brain imaging; vision, speech and signal processing; control, robotics and hardware technologies and novel approaches and applications.

Big data and human-computer information retrieval (HCIR) are changing IR. They capture the dynamic changes in the data and dynamic interactions of users with IR systems. A dynamic system is one which changes or adapts over time or a sequence of events. Many modern IR systems and data exhibit these characteristics which are largely ignored by conventional techniques. What is missing is an ability for the model to change over time and be responsive to stimulus. Documents, relevance, users and tasks all exhibit dynamic behavior that is captured in data sets typically collected over long time spans and models need to respond to these changes. Additionally, the size of modern datasets enforces limits on the amount of learning a system can achieve. Further to this, advances in IR interface, personalization and ad display demand models that can react to users in real time and in an intelligent, contextual way. In this book we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling, the statistical modeling of IR systems that can adapt to change. We define dynamics, what it means within the context of IR and highlight examples of problems where dynamics play an important role. We cover techniques ranging from classic relevance feedback to the latest applications of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and a handful of useful algorithms and tools for solving IR problems incorporating dynamics. The theoretical component is based around the Markov Decision Process (MDP), a mathematical framework taken from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables us to construct models that change according to sequential inputs. We define the framework and the algorithms commonly used to optimize over it and generalize it to the case where the inputs aren't reliable. We explore the topic of reinforcement learning more broadly and introduce another tool known as a Multi-Armed Bandit which is useful for cases where exploring model parameters is beneficial. Following this we introduce theories and algorithms which can be used to incorporate dynamics into an IR model before presenting an array of state-of-the-art research that already does, such as in the areas of session search and online advertising. Change is at the heart of modern Information Retrieval systems and this book will help equip the reader with the tools and knowledge needed to understand Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling.

A comprehensive and rigorous introduction for graduate students and researchers, with applications in sequential decision-making problems.

Interested in how an efficient search engine works? Want to know what algorithms are used to rank resulting documents in response to user requests? The authors answer these and other key information retrieval design and implementation questions. This book is not yet another high level text. Instead, algorithms are thoroughly described, making this book ideally suited for both computer science students and practitioners who work on search-related applications. As stated in the foreword, this book provides a current, broad, and detailed overview of the field and is the only one that does so. Examples are used throughout to illustrate the algorithms. The authors explain how a query is ranked against a document collection using either a single or a combination of retrieval strategies, and how an assortment of utilities are integrated into the query processing scheme to improve these rankings. Methods for building and compressing text indexes, querying and retrieving documents in multiple languages, and using parallel or distributed processing to expedite the search are likewise described. This edition is a major expansion of the one published in 1998. Besides updating the entire book with current techniques, it includes new sections on language models, cross-language information retrieval, peer-to-peer processing, XML search, mediators, and duplicate document detection.

The three-volume set LNCS 13980, 13981 and 13982 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 45th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2023, held in Dublin, Ireland, during April 2-6, 2023. The 65 full papers, 41 short papers, 19 demonstration papers, 12 reproducibility papers consortium papers, 7 tutorial papers, and 10 doctorial consortium papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 489 submissions. The book also contains, 8 workshop summaries and 13 CLEF Lab descriptions. The accepted papers cover the state of the art in information retrieval focusing on user aspects, system and foundational aspects, machine learning, applications, evaluation, new social and technical challenges, and other topics of direct or indirect relevance to search.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 36th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2014, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2014. The 33 full papers, 50 poster papers and 15 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 288 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: evaluation, recommendation, optimization, semantics, aggregation, queries, mining social media, digital libraries, efficiency, and information retrieval theory. Also included are 3 tutorial and 4 workshop presentations.