A framework for refining similarity queries using learning techniques

  • Authors:

  • Yiming Ma;Qi Zhong;Sharad Mehrotra;Dawit Yimam Seid

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In numerous applications that deal with similarity search, a user may not have an exact idea of his information need and/or may not be able to construct a query that exactly captures his notion of similarity. A promising approach to mitigate this problem is to enable the user to submit a rough approximation of the desired query and use the feedback on the relevance of the retrieved objects to refine the query. In this paper, we explore such a refinement strategy for a general class of SQL similarity queries. Our approach casts the refinement problem as that of learning concepts using examples. This is achieved by viewing the tuples on which a user provides feedback as a labeled training set for a learner. Under this setup, SQL query refinement consists of two learning tasks, namely learning the structure of the SQL query and learning the relative importance of the query components. The paper develops appropriate machine learning approaches suitable for these two learning tasks. The primary contribution of the paper is a general refinement framework that decides when each learner is invoked in order to quickly learn the user query. Experimental analyses over many real life datasets and queries show that our strategy outperforms the existing approaches significantly in terms of retrieval accuracy and query simplicity.