Related papers: Query-based versus resource-based cache strategies…
Faceted browsing is a commonly supported feature of user interfaces for access to information. Existing interfaces generally treat facet values selected by a user as hard filters and respond to the user by only displaying information items…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
Retrieval and content management are assumed to be mutually exclusive. In this paper we suggest that they need not be so. In the usual information retrieval scenario, some information about queries leading to a website (due to `hits' or…
Replicating or caching popular content in memories distributed across the network is a technique to reduce peak network loads. Conventionally, the performance gain of caching was thought to result from making part of the requested data…
Query-based searching and browsing-based navigation are the two main components of exploratory search. Search lets users dig in deep by controlling their actions to focus on and find just the information they need, whereas navigation helps…
We tackle tag-based query refinement as a mobile-friendly alternative to standard facet search. We approach the inference challenge with reinforcement learning, and propose a deep contextual bandit that can be efficiently scaled in a…
Conversational and question-based recommender systems have gained increasing attention in recent years, with users enabled to converse with the system and better control recommendations. Nevertheless, research in the field is still limited,…
We address the problem of answering queries over a distributed information system, storing objects indexed by terms organized in a taxonomy. The taxonomy consists of subsumption relationships between negation-free DNF formulas on terms and…
Search engines rely heavily on term-based approaches that represent queries and documents as bags of words. Text---a document or a query---is represented by a bag of its words that ignores grammar and word order, but retains word frequency…
Modern big data systems run on cloud environments where resources are shared amongst several users and applications. As a result, declarative user queries in these environments need to be optimized and executed over resources that…
Navigation on graphs is the problem how an agent walking on the graph can get from a source to a target with limited information about the graph. The information and the way to exploit it can vary. In this paper, we study navigation on…
Recently, collaborative tagging systems have attracted more and more attention and have been widely applied in web systems. Tags provide highly abstracted information about personal preferences and item content, and are therefore potential…
Growing privacy regulations and internal governance mandates are driving demand for fine-grained, context-sensitive access control in data management systems. Among competing approaches, content-based access control -- where access…
Performance evaluation of caching systems is an old and widely investigated research topic. The research community is once again actively working on this topic because the Internet is evolving towards new transfer modes, which envisage to…
Search and recommendation are the two most common approaches used by people to obtain information. They share the same goal -- satisfying the user's information need at the right time. There are already a lot of Internet platforms and Apps…
Traditional approaches to ranking in web search follow the paradigm of rank-by-score: a learned function gives each query-URL combination an absolute score and URLs are ranked according to this score. This paradigm ensures that if the score…
Traditional search methods primarily depend on string matches, while semantic search targets concept-based matches by recognizing underlying intents and contextual meanings of search terms. Semantic search is particularly beneficial for…
Question Answering (QA) is increasingly used by search engines to provide results to their end-users, yet very few websites currently use QA technologies for their search functionality. To illustrate the potential of QA technologies for the…
One of the most important assets of any company is being able to easily access information on itself and on its business. In this line, it has been observed that this important information is often stored in one of the millions of…
Caching networks are designed to reduce traffic load at backhaul links, by serving demands from edge-nodes. In the past decades, many studies have been done to address the caching problem. However, in practice, finding an optimal caching…