The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.
{"title":"Neural Approaches to Conversational AI","authors":"Jianfeng Gao, Michel Galley, Lihong Li","doi":"10.1561/1500000074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000074","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.\u0000</p>","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2019-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Search engines are exceptionally important tools for accessing information in today’s world. In satisfying the information needs of millions of users, the effectiveness (the quality of the search results) and the efficiency (the speed at which the results are returned to the users) of a search engine are two goals that form a natural trade-off, as techniques that improve the effectiveness of the search engine can also make it less efficient. Meanwhile, search engines continue to rapidly evolve, with larger indexes, more complex retrieval strategies and growing query volumes. Hence, there is a need for the development of efficient query processing infrastructures that make appropriate sacrifices in effectiveness in order to make gains in efficiency. This survey comprehensively reviews the foundations of search engines, from index layouts to basic term-at-a-time (TAAT) and document-at-a-time (DAAT) query processing strategies, while also providing the latest trends in the literature in efficient query processing, including the coherent and systematic reviews of techniques such as dynamic pruning and impact-sorted posting lists as well as their variants and optimisations. Our explanations of query processing strategies, for instance the WAND and BMW dynamic pruning algorithms, are presented with illustrative figures showing how the processing state changes as the algorithms progress. Moreover, acknowledging the recent trends in applying a cascading infrastructure within search systems, this survey describes techniques for efficiently integrating effective learned models, such as those obtained from learning-torank techniques. The survey also covers the selective application of query processing techniques, often achieved by predicting the response times of the search engine (known as query efficiency prediction), and making per-query tradeoffs between efficiency and effectiveness to ensure that the required retrieval speed targets can be met. Finally, the survey concludes with a summary of open directions in efficient search infrastructures, namely the use of signatures, real-time, energy-efficient and modern hardware & software architectures.
{"title":"Efficient Query Processing for Scalable Web Search","authors":"N. Tonellotto, C. Macdonald, I. Ounis","doi":"10.1561/1500000057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000057","url":null,"abstract":"Search engines are exceptionally important tools for accessing information in today’s world. In satisfying the information needs of millions of users, the effectiveness (the quality of the search results) and the efficiency (the speed at which the results are returned to the users) of a search engine are two goals that form a natural trade-off, as techniques that improve the effectiveness of the search engine can also make it less efficient. Meanwhile, search engines continue to rapidly evolve, with larger indexes, more complex retrieval strategies and growing query volumes. Hence, there is a need for the development of efficient query processing infrastructures that make appropriate sacrifices in effectiveness in order to make gains in efficiency. This survey comprehensively reviews the foundations of search engines, from index layouts to basic term-at-a-time (TAAT) and document-at-a-time (DAAT) query processing strategies, while also providing the latest trends in the literature in efficient query processing, including the coherent and systematic reviews of techniques such as dynamic pruning and impact-sorted posting lists as well as their variants and optimisations. Our explanations of query processing strategies, for instance the WAND and BMW dynamic pruning algorithms, are presented with illustrative figures showing how the processing state changes as the algorithms progress. Moreover, acknowledging the recent trends in applying a cascading infrastructure within search systems, this survey describes techniques for efficiently integrating effective learned models, such as those obtained from learning-torank techniques. The survey also covers the selective application of query processing techniques, often achieved by predicting the response times of the search engine (known as query efficiency prediction), and making per-query tradeoffs between efficiency and effectiveness to ensure that the required retrieval speed targets can be met. Finally, the survey concludes with a summary of open directions in efficient search infrastructures, namely the use of signatures, real-time, energy-efficient and modern hardware & software architectures.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"40 1","pages":"319-500"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2018-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84551326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Neural models have been employed in many Information Retrieval scenarios, including ad-hoc retrieval, recommender systems, multi-media search, and even conversational systems that generate answers in response to natural language questions. An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval provides a tutorial introduction to neural methods for ranking documents in response to a query, an important IR task. The monograph provides a complete picture of neural information retrieval techniques that culminate in supervised neural learning to rank models including deep neural network architectures that are trained end-to-end for ranking tasks. In reaching this point, the authors cover all the important topics, including the learning to rank framework and an overview of deep neural networks. This monograph provides an accessible, yet comprehensive, overview of the state-of-the-art of Neural Information Retrieval.
{"title":"An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval","authors":"Bhaskar Mitra, Nick Craswell","doi":"10.1561/1500000061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000061","url":null,"abstract":"Neural models have been employed in many Information Retrieval scenarios, including ad-hoc retrieval, recommender systems, multi-media search, and even conversational systems that generate answers in response to natural language questions. An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval provides a tutorial introduction to neural methods for ranking documents in response to a query, an important IR task. The monograph provides a complete picture of neural information retrieval techniques that culminate in supervised neural learning to rank models including deep neural network architectures that are trained end-to-end for ranking tasks. In reaching this point, the authors cover all the important topics, including the learning to rank framework and an overview of deep neural networks. This monograph provides an accessible, yet comprehensive, overview of the state-of-the-art of Neural Information Retrieval.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"32 1","pages":"1-126"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2018-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86139477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some contexts). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendation systems. It also facilitates system designers for better system debugging. In recent years, a large number of explainable recommendation approaches -- especially model-based methods -- have been proposed and applied in real-world systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review for the explainable recommendation research. We first highlight the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation on three perspectives: 1) We provide a chronological research timeline of explainable recommendation. 2) We provide a two-dimensional taxonomy to classify existing explainable recommendation research. 3) We summarize how explainable recommendation applies to different recommendation tasks. We also devote a chapter to discuss the explanation perspectives in broader IR and AI/ML research. We end the survey by discussing potential future directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area and beyond.
{"title":"Explainable Recommendation: A Survey and New Perspectives","authors":"Yongfeng Zhang, Xu Chen","doi":"10.1561/1500000066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000066","url":null,"abstract":"Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some contexts). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendation systems. It also facilitates system designers for better system debugging. In recent years, a large number of explainable recommendation approaches -- especially model-based methods -- have been proposed and applied in real-world systems. \u0000In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review for the explainable recommendation research. We first highlight the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation on three perspectives: 1) We provide a chronological research timeline of explainable recommendation. 2) We provide a two-dimensional taxonomy to classify existing explainable recommendation research. 3) We summarize how explainable recommendation applies to different recommendation tasks. We also devote a chapter to discuss the explanation perspectives in broader IR and AI/ML research. We end the survey by discussing potential future directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area and beyond.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"18 1","pages":"1-101"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87223946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Purves, Paul D. Clough, Christopher B. Jones, M. Hall, Vanessa Murdock
Significant amounts of information available today contain references to places on earth. Traditionally such information has been held as structured data and was the concern of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). However, increasing amounts of data in the form of unstructured text are available for indexing and retrieval that also contain spatial references. This monograph describes the field of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) that seeks to develop spatially-aware search systems and support user’s geographical information needs. Important concepts with respect to storing, querying and analysing geographical information in computers are introduced, before user needs and interaction in the context of GIR are explored. The task of associating documents with coordinates, prior to their indexing and ranking forms the core of any GIR system, and different approaches and their implications are discussed. Evaluating the resulting systems and their components, and different paradigms for doing so continue to be an important area of research in GIR and are illustrated through several examples. The monograph provides an overview of the research field, and in so doing identifies key remaining research challenges in GIR.
{"title":"Geographic Information Retrieval: Progress and Challenges in Spatial Search of Text","authors":"R. Purves, Paul D. Clough, Christopher B. Jones, M. Hall, Vanessa Murdock","doi":"10.1561/1500000034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000034","url":null,"abstract":"Significant amounts of information available today contain references to places on earth. Traditionally such information has been held as structured data and was the concern of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). However, increasing amounts of data in the form of unstructured text are available for indexing and retrieval that also contain spatial references. This monograph describes the field of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) that seeks to develop spatially-aware search systems and support user’s geographical information needs. Important concepts with respect to storing, querying and analysing geographical information in computers are introduced, before user needs and interaction in the context of GIR are explored. The task of associating documents with coordinates, prior to their indexing and ranking forms the core of any GIR system, and different approaches and their implications are discussed. Evaluating the resulting systems and their components, and different paradigms for doing so continue to be an important area of research in GIR and are illustrated through several examples. The monograph provides an overview of the research field, and in so doing identifies key remaining research challenges in GIR.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"10 1","pages":"164-318"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88432922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Hoogeveen, Li Wang, Timothy Baldwin, Karin M. Verspoor
This survey presents an overview of information retrieval, natural languageprocessing and machine learning research that makes use of forumdata, including both discussion forums and community questionansweringcQA archives. The focus is on automated analysis, withthe goal of gaining a better understanding of the data and its users.We discuss the different strategies used for both retrieval taskspost retrieval, question retrieval, and answer retrieval and classificationtasks post type classification, question classification, post qualityassessment, subjectivity, and viewpoint classification at the postlevel, as well as at the thread level thread retrieval, solvedness andtask orientation, discourse structure recovery and dialogue act tagging,QA-pair extraction, and thread summarisation. We also review workon forum users, including user satisfaction, expert finding, questionrecommendation and routing, and community analysis.The survey includes a brief history of forums, an overview of thedifferent kinds of forums, a summary of publicly available datasets forforum research, and a short discussion on the evaluation of retrievaltasks using forum data.The aim is to give a broad overview of the different kinds of forumresearch, a summary of the methods that have been applied, some insightsinto successful strategies, and potential areas for future research.
{"title":"Web Forum Retrieval and Text Analytics: A Survey","authors":"D. Hoogeveen, Li Wang, Timothy Baldwin, Karin M. Verspoor","doi":"10.1561/1500000062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000062","url":null,"abstract":"This survey presents an overview of information retrieval, natural languageprocessing and machine learning research that makes use of forumdata, including both discussion forums and community questionansweringcQA archives. The focus is on automated analysis, withthe goal of gaining a better understanding of the data and its users.We discuss the different strategies used for both retrieval taskspost retrieval, question retrieval, and answer retrieval and classificationtasks post type classification, question classification, post qualityassessment, subjectivity, and viewpoint classification at the postlevel, as well as at the thread level thread retrieval, solvedness andtask orientation, discourse structure recovery and dialogue act tagging,QA-pair extraction, and thread summarisation. We also review workon forum users, including user satisfaction, expert finding, questionrecommendation and routing, and community analysis.The survey includes a brief history of forums, an overview of thedifferent kinds of forums, a summary of publicly available datasets forforum research, and a short discussion on the evaluation of retrievaltasks using forum data.The aim is to give a broad overview of the different kinds of forumresearch, a summary of the methods that have been applied, some insightsinto successful strategies, and potential areas for future research.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"54 1","pages":"1-163"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79217784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How can a single person understand what’s going on in a collection of millions of documents? This is an increasingly widespread problem: sifting through an organization’s e-mails, understanding a decade worth of newspapers, or characterizing a scientific field’s research. This monograph explores the ways that humans and computers make sense of document collections through tools called topic models. Topic models are a statistical framework that help users understand large document collections; not just to find individual documents but to understand the general themes present in the collection. Applications of Topic Models describes the recent academic and industrial applications of topic models. In addition to topic models’ effective application to traditional problems like information retrieval, visualization, statistical inference, multilingual modeling, and linguistic understanding, Applications of Topic Models also reviews topic models’ ability to unlock large text collections for qualitative analysis. It reviews their successful use by researchers to help understand fiction, non-fiction, scientific publications, and political texts. Applications of Topic Models is aimed at the reader with some knowledge of document processing, basic understanding of some probability, and interested in many application domains. It discusses the information needs of each application area, and how those specific needs affect models, curation procedures, and interpretations. By the end of the monograph, it is hoped that readers will be excited enough to attempt to embark on building their own topic models. It should also be of interest to topic model experts as the coverage of diverse applications may expose models and approaches they had not seen before.
{"title":"Applications of Topic Models","authors":"Jordan L. Boyd-Graber, Yuening Hu, David Mimno","doi":"10.1561/1500000030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000030","url":null,"abstract":"How can a single person understand what’s going on in a collection of millions of documents? This is an increasingly widespread problem: sifting through an organization’s e-mails, understanding a decade worth of newspapers, or characterizing a scientific field’s research. This monograph explores the ways that humans and computers make sense of document collections through tools called topic models. Topic models are a statistical framework that help users understand large document collections; not just to find individual documents but to understand the general themes present in the collection. Applications of Topic Models describes the recent academic and industrial applications of topic models. In addition to topic models’ effective application to traditional problems like information retrieval, visualization, statistical inference, multilingual modeling, and linguistic understanding, Applications of Topic Models also reviews topic models’ ability to unlock large text collections for qualitative analysis. It reviews their successful use by researchers to help understand fiction, non-fiction, scientific publications, and political texts. Applications of Topic Models is aimed at the reader with some knowledge of document processing, basic understanding of some probability, and interested in many application domains. It discusses the information needs of each application area, and how those specific needs affect models, curation procedures, and interpretations. By the end of the monograph, it is hoped that readers will be excited enough to attempt to embark on building their own topic models. It should also be of interest to topic model experts as the coverage of diverse applications may expose models and approaches they had not seen before.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"18 1","pages":"143-296"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2017-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81818542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The goal of aggregated search is to provide integrated search across multiple heterogeneous search services in a unified interfacea single query box and a common presentation of results. In the web search domain, aggregated search systems are responsible for integrating results from specialized search services, or verticals, alongside the core web results. For example, search portals such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! provide access to vertical search engines that focus on different types of media (images and video), different types of search tasks (search for local businesses and online products), and even applications that can help users complete certain tasks (language translation and math calculations). This monograph provides a comprehensive summary of previous research in aggregated search. It starts by describing why aggregated search requires unique solutions. It then discusses different sources of evidence that are likely to be available to an aggregated search system, as well as different techniques for integrating evidence in order to make vertical selection and presentation decisions. Next, it surveys different evaluation methodologies for aggregated search and discusses prior user studies that have aimed to better understand how users behave with aggregated search interfaces. It proceeds to review different advanced topics in aggregated search. It concludes by highlighting the main trends and discussing short-term and long-term areas for future work.
{"title":"Aggregated Search","authors":"Jaime Arguello","doi":"10.1561/1500000052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000052","url":null,"abstract":"The goal of aggregated search is to provide integrated search across multiple heterogeneous search services in a unified interfacea single query box and a common presentation of results. In the web search domain, aggregated search systems are responsible for integrating results from specialized search services, or verticals, alongside the core web results. For example, search portals such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! provide access to vertical search engines that focus on different types of media (images and video), different types of search tasks (search for local businesses and online products), and even applications that can help users complete certain tasks (language translation and math calculations). This monograph provides a comprehensive summary of previous research in aggregated search. It starts by describing why aggregated search requires unique solutions. It then discusses different sources of evidence that are likely to be available to an aggregated search system, as well as different techniques for integrating evidence in order to make vertical selection and presentation decisions. Next, it surveys different evaluation methodologies for aggregated search and discusses prior user studies that have aimed to better understand how users behave with aggregated search interfaces. It proceeds to review different advanced topics in aggregated search. It concludes by highlighting the main trends and discussing short-term and long-term areas for future work.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"20 1","pages":"365-502"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2017-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81758037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In information retrieval, query auto completion (QAC), also known as type-ahead and auto-complete suggestion, refers to the following functionality: given a prex consisting of a number of characters entered into a search box, the user interface proposes alternative ways of extending the prex to a full query. QAC helps users to formulate their query when they have an intent in mind but not a clear way of expressing this in a query. It helps to avoid possible spelling mistakes, especially on devices with small screens. It saves keystrokes and cuts down the search duration of users which implies a lower load on the search engine, and results in savings in machine resources and maintenance. Because of the clear benets of QAC, a considerable number of algorithmic approaches to QAC have been proposed in the past few years. Query logs have proven to be a key asset underlying most of the recent research. This monograph surveys this research. It focuses on summarizing the literature on QAC and provides a general understanding of the wealth of QAC approaches that are currently available. A Survey of Query Auto Completion in Information Retrieval is an ideal reference on the topic. Its contributions can be summarized as follows: It provides researchers who are working on query auto completion or related problems in the eld of information retrieval with a good overview and analysis of state-of-the-art QAC approaches. In particular, for researchers new to the eld, the survey can serve as an introduction to the state-of-the-art. It also offers a comprehensive perspective on QAC approaches by presenting a taxonomy of existing solutions. In addition, it presents solutions for QAC under different conditions such as available high-resolution query logs, in-depth user interactions with QAC using eye-tracking, and elaborate user engagements in a QAC process. It also discusses practical issues related to QAC. Lastly, it presents a detailed discussion of core challenges and promising open directions in QAC.
{"title":"A Survey of Query Auto Completion in Information Retrieval","authors":"Fei Cai, M. de Rijke","doi":"10.1561/1500000055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000055","url":null,"abstract":"In information retrieval, query auto completion (QAC), also known as type-ahead and auto-complete suggestion, refers to the following functionality: given a prex consisting of a number of characters entered into a search box, the user interface proposes alternative ways of extending the prex to a full query. QAC helps users to formulate their query when they have an intent in mind but not a clear way of expressing this in a query. It helps to avoid possible spelling mistakes, especially on devices with small screens. It saves keystrokes and cuts down the search duration of users which implies a lower load on the search engine, and results in savings in machine resources and maintenance. Because of the clear benets of QAC, a considerable number of algorithmic approaches to QAC have been proposed in the past few years. Query logs have proven to be a key asset underlying most of the recent research. This monograph surveys this research. It focuses on summarizing the literature on QAC and provides a general understanding of the wealth of QAC approaches that are currently available. A Survey of Query Auto Completion in Information Retrieval is an ideal reference on the topic. Its contributions can be summarized as follows: It provides researchers who are working on query auto completion or related problems in the eld of information retrieval with a good overview and analysis of state-of-the-art QAC approaches. In particular, for researchers new to the eld, the survey can serve as an introduction to the state-of-the-art. It also offers a comprehensive perspective on QAC approaches by presenting a taxonomy of existing solutions. In addition, it presents solutions for QAC under different conditions such as available high-resolution query logs, in-depth user interactions with QAC using eye-tracking, and elaborate user engagements in a QAC process. It also discusses practical issues related to QAC. Lastly, it presents a detailed discussion of core challenges and promising open directions in QAC.","PeriodicalId":48829,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval","volume":"17 1","pages":"273-363"},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2016-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77250135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}