A new approach for fuzzy information retrieval based on weighted power-mean averaging operators

To properly handle concurrent accesses to documents by updates and queries in information retrieval (IR) systems, efforts are on to integrate IR features with database management system (DBMS) features. However, initial research has revealed that DBMS features optimized for traditional databases, display degraded performance while handling text databases. Since efficiency is critical in IR systems, infrastructural extensions are necessary for several DBMS features, transaction support being one of them. This paper focuses on developing efficient transaction support for IR systems where updates and queries arrive $dynamically$, by exploiting the data characteristics of the indexes as well as of the queries and updates that access the indexes. Results of performance tests on a prototype system demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithms.

Both phrases and Boolean queries have a long history in information retrieval, particularly in commercial systems. In previous work, Boolean queries have been used as a source of phrases for a statistical retrieval model, This work, like the majority of research on phrases, resulted in little improvement in retrieval effectiveness, In this paper, we describe an approach where phrases identified in natural language queries are used to build structured queries for a probabilistic retrieval model. Our results show that using phrases in this way can improve performance, and that phrases that are automatically extracted from a natural language query perform nearly as well as manually selected phrases.

The exploding number of computational models produced by Systems Biologists over the last years is an invitation to structure and exploit this new wealth of information. Researchers would like to trace models relevant to specific scientific questions, to explore their biological content, to align and combine them, and to match them with experimental data. To automate these processes, it is essential to consider semantic annotations, which describe their biological meaning. As a prerequisite for a wide range of computational methods, we propose general and flexible similarity measures for Systems Biology models computed from semantic annotations. By using these measures and a large extensible ontology, we implement a platform that can retrieve, cluster, and align Systems Biology models and experimental data sets. At present, its major application is the search for relevant models in the BioModels Database, starting from initial models, data sets, or lists of biological concepts. Beyond similarity searches, the representation of models by semantic feature vectors may pave the way for visualisation, exploration, and statistical analysis of large collections of models and corresponding data.

Concept analysis via rough set and AFS algebra

The proliferation of the World Wide Web has brought information retrieval (IR) techniques to the forefront of search technology. To the average computer user, “searching” now means using IR-based systems for finding information on the WWW or in other document collections. IR query evaluation methods and workloads differ significantly from those found in database systems. In this paper, we focus on three such differences. First, due to the inherent fuzziness of the natural language used in IR queries and documents, an additional degree of flexibility is permitted in evaluating queries. Second, IR query evaluation algorithms tend to have access patterns that cause problems for traditional buffer replacement policies. Third, IR search is often an iterative process, in which a query is repeatedly refined and resubmitted by the user. Based on these differences, we develop two complementary techniques to improve the efficiency of IR queries: 1) Buffer-aware query evaluation, which alters the query evaluation process based on the current contents of buffers; and 2) Ranking-aware buffer replacement, which incorporates knowledge of the query processing strategy into replacement decisions. In a detailed performance study we show that using either of these techniques yields significant performance benefits and that in many cases, combining them produces even further improvements.

In Information Retrieval it is well-known that the complexity of processing boolean queries depends on the size of the intermediate results, which could be huge (and are typically on disk) even though the size of the final result may be quite small. In the case of inverted files the most time consuming operation is the merging or intersection of the list of occurrences [1]. We propose, the Keyword tree (K-tree) and forest, efficient structures to handle boolean queries in keyword-based information retrieval. Extensive simulations show that K-tree is orders-of-magnitude faster (i.e., far fewer I/O's) for boolean queries than the usual approach of merging the lists of occurrences and incurs only a small overhead for single keyword queries. The K-tree can be efficiently parallelized as well. The construction cost of K-tree is comparable to the cost of building inverted files.

The probabilistic linguistic terms set (PLTS) consists of several possible linguistic terms and their relative probability, and the Power average (PA) operator takes the interrelationships among the attributes into consideration. At the same time, the bidirectional projection (BP) method can consider the distance and the angle of the evaluated alternatives, moreover, it can also take the bidirectional projection magnitude into account. For the sake of fully taking the advantages of PLTS, PA operator and the BP method, in this article, we combine the PA operator with the BP method and extend it to the environment of probabilistic linguistic information (PLI), meanwhile, based on the calculation process of the weighted averaging operator of distribution assessments, the probabilistic linguistic PA (PLPA) operator and the weighted probabilistic linguistic PA (WPLPA) operator are proposed. Simultaneously, we discuss some properties of these operators. Further, we define the BP measures based on PLTS. Based on the combination of the WPLPA operator and the BP method, we develop the approach which can solve the problems of multiple attribute group decision-making with PLI. Lastly, a numerical instance is given to demonstrate the feasibility and the superiority of the proposed method.

The First International Workshop on Graph-Based Approaches in Information Retrieval (IRonGraphs 2024) was held as a physical (in-person) event on March 24, 2024, in conjunction with the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) in Glasgow (Scotland). The scientific program included paper, spotlight, and poster presentations. Two keynote talks were delivered by Francesco Fabbri (Spotify, Spain) and Ruihong Qiu (University of Queensland, Australia). This report presents an overview of the activities conducted during the workshop and the main topics covered. Date : 24 March 2024. Website : https://irongraphs.github.io/ecir2024/.

Over the past decade, information retrieval has emerged as an active research area in the application of fuzzy set theory. Fuzzy information retrieval utilizes fuzzy sets to represent documents, membership degrees for query term relevance, fuzzy logical operators to define queries, and fuzzy compatibility measures to assess the retrieval status value of a document. This paper presents an overview of fuzzy relational databases and fuzzy information retrieval. A general description of the main components of fuzzy information retrieval are given: document representation, query representation, computer-aided query formulation, document retrieval status, and performance measures. Examples of areas currently being researched are provided. The relation between fuzzy information retrieval and fuzzy relational databases is examined.

Medical Information Retrieval (IR) aims to extract relevant medical information from the web, patients' records, electronic books, research articles etc. However, users are generally unfamiliar with medical terms and find difficulties expressing their needs. One interesting solution is to integrate fuzzy ontologies in order to achieve semantic interoperability and offer a way to handle vague and imprecise information regarding the medical field. In this paper, our aim is to perform an effective IR by extending its understanding of ambiguous medical concepts. We propose a fuzzy ontology-based medical IR approach which is composed of three components: (1) personalized medical ontology building, (2) contextualized fuzzification of the personalized medical ontology and (3) a query reformulation process based on the resulting fuzzy ontology. A prototype has been implemented allowing experimental evaluation of the proposal. We have studied how the query reformulation has led to a quality results improvement.

Relevance feedback techniques have demonstrated to be a powerful means to improve the results obtained when a user submits a query to an information retrieval system as the world wide web search engines. These kinds of techniques modify the user original query taking into account the relevance judgements provided by him on the retrieved documents, making it more similar to those he judged as relevant. This way, the new generated query permits to get new relevant documents thus improving the retrieval process by increasing recall. However, although powerful relevance feedback techniques have been developed for the vector space information retrieval model and some of them have been translated to the classical Boolean model, there is a lack of these tools in more advanced and powerful information retrieval models such as the fuzzy one. In this contribution we introduce a relevance feedback process for extended Boolean (fuzzy) information retrieval systems based on a hybrid evolutionary algorithm combining simulated annealing and genetic programming components. The performance of the proposed technique will be compared with the only previous existing approach to perform this task, Kraft et al.'s method, showing how our proposal outperforms the latter in terms of accuracy and sometimes also in time consumption. Moreover, it will be showed how the adaptation of the retrieval threshold by the relevance feedback mechanism allows the system effectiveness to be increased.

In this paper, we define aggregation operators for trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy sets which includes generalized cubic linguistic fuzzy averaging (geometric) operator, generalized trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy weighted averaging (GTrCLFWA) operator, generalized trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy weighted geometric (GTrCFWG) operator, generalized trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy ordered weighted average (GTrCLFOWA) operator, generalized trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy ordered weighted geometric (GTrCLFOWG) operator, generalized trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy hybrid averaging (GTrCLFHA) operator and generalized trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy hybrid geometric (GTrCLFHG) operator. Furthermore, we relate these aggregation operators to develop an approach to multiple attribute group decision-making with trapezoidal cubic linguistic fuzzy information. Finally, a numerical example is providing to demonstrate the submission of the established approach.

Genetic programming is applied to an information retrieval system in order to improve Boolean query formulation via relevance feedback. This approach brings together the concepts of information retrieval and genetic programming. Documents are viewed as vectors in index term space. A Boolean query, viewed as a parse tree, is an organism in the genetic programming sense. Through the mechanisms of genetic programming, the query is modified in order to improve precision and recall. Relevance feedback is incorporated, in part, via user defined measures over a trial set of documents. The fitness of a candidate query can be expressed directly as a function of the relevance of the retrieved set. Preliminary results based on a testbed are given. The form of the fitness function has a significant effect upon performance and the proper fitness functions take into account relevance based on topicality (and perhaps other factors).< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Triangular Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy number (TAIFN) has better ability to model fuzzy ill-defined quantity. The information aggregation of TAIFNs is of great importance in multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM). In this paper, some arithmetic aggregation operators for TAIFNs are defined, with the triangular Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy weighted average (TAIFWA) operator, ordered weighted average (TAIFOWA) operator and hybrid weighted average (TAIFHWA) operator included. Then we further investigate the Atanassov’s triangular intuitionistic fuzzy generalized ordered weighted average (TAIFGOWA) operator and generalized hybrid weighted average (TAIFGHWA) operator. Some desirable and useful properties of these operators, such as idempotence, monotonicity and boundedness, are also discussed. For the MAGDM with TAIFNs and incomplete attribute weight information, a multi-objective programming model is constructed by minimizing total deviation between all alternatives and fuzzy positive ideal solution, which is transformed into a linear goal programming. Consequently, the attribute weights are objectively derived. Thereby, an innovated MAGDM method is proposed on the basis of the TAIFWA and TAIFGHWA operators. Finally, a green supplier selection example is provided to illuminate the practicability of the proposed method in this paper.

An m-polar fuzzy set is a powerful mathematical model to analyze multipolar, multiattribute, and multi-index data. The m-polar fuzzy sets have appeared as a useful tool to portray uncertainty in multiattribute decision making. The purpose of this article is to analyze the aggregation operators under the m-polar fuzzy environment with the help of Dombi norm operations. In this article, we develop some averaging and geometric aggregation operators using Dombi t-norm and t-conorm to handle uncertainty in m-polar fuzzy (mF, henceforth) information, which are mF Dombi weighted averaging (mFDWA) operator, mF Dombi ordered weighted averaging (mFDOWA) operator, mF Dombi hybrid averaging (mFDHA) operator, mF Dombi weighted geometric (mFDWG) operator, mF Dombi weighted ordered geometric operator, and mF Dombi hybrid geometric (mFDHG) operator. We investigate properties, namely, idempotency, monotonicity, and boundedness, for the proposed operators. Moreover, we give an algorithm to solve multicriteria decision-making issues which involve mF information with mFDWA and mFDWG operators. To prove the validity and feasibility of the proposed model, we solve two numerical examples with our proposed models and give comparison with mF-ELECTRE-I approach (Akram et al. 2019) and mF Hamacher aggregation operators (Waseem et al. 2019). Finally, we check the effectiveness of the developed operators by a validity test.