Effective image search and retrieval through automatic image annotation. This project aims to develop an effective and efficient image retrieval system, so that images are retrieved as easily as textual data. The project researches and develops several key know-hows in image retrieval. It enables Australia to maintain significant advantage in the frontier technology of information processing.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200100064
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$422,022.00
Summary
Fair and Transparent Information Access in Spoken Conversational Assistants. This project aims to investigate how rich information needed to answer complex questions can be delivered via a speech-only communication channel. Using laboratory user studies, where users can interact with a smart speaker to ask for information about controversial or multi-perspective topics, the project expects to advance knowledge on how to expose pertinent information without creating or reinforcing biases. Expecte ....Fair and Transparent Information Access in Spoken Conversational Assistants. This project aims to investigate how rich information needed to answer complex questions can be delivered via a speech-only communication channel. Using laboratory user studies, where users can interact with a smart speaker to ask for information about controversial or multi-perspective topics, the project expects to advance knowledge on how to expose pertinent information without creating or reinforcing biases. Expected outcomes include novel presentation strategies to access rich information via audio in a fair manner. This should significantly benefit the visually impaired and low-literacy communities by enhancing their access to topics with multiple point of views, which would impact decision making such as who to vote for in elections.Read moreRead less
Efficient and effective ad-hoc search using structured and unstructured geospatial information. Web search is a key enabling technology in the information age. However two technologies, ubiquitous mobile devices and massive structured data repositories such as those used to maintain social networking sites, are changing user expectations about how and what should be searched. A key challenge in the research community is how to integrate structured and unstructured information to improve the qual ....Efficient and effective ad-hoc search using structured and unstructured geospatial information. Web search is a key enabling technology in the information age. However two technologies, ubiquitous mobile devices and massive structured data repositories such as those used to maintain social networking sites, are changing user expectations about how and what should be searched. A key challenge in the research community is how to integrate structured and unstructured information to improve the quality of search. This project proposes new approaches to ranked retrieval for location-aware search. In particular, it presents a plan to combine state-of-the-art research from two domains: spatial keyword search in databases, and ad-hoc search in Information Retrieval to improve the quality of search results.Read moreRead less
New approaches to interactive sessional search for complex tasks. This project aims to develop new tools and techniques to improve the accuracy and speed of search and data analytics for complex information tasks. There are currently no publicly available search engines which support users engaged in complex interactive search, or that allow searchers to fully control their own data and privacy. Fundamental research advances, based on understanding real user behaviour and search needs will have ....New approaches to interactive sessional search for complex tasks. This project aims to develop new tools and techniques to improve the accuracy and speed of search and data analytics for complex information tasks. There are currently no publicly available search engines which support users engaged in complex interactive search, or that allow searchers to fully control their own data and privacy. Fundamental research advances, based on understanding real user behaviour and search needs will have an impact on important academic, industrial, and government domains, including virtual assistants, health care (clinical decision support), precision medicine, eDiscovery, crime prevention, and detailed socio-economic evaluations.Read moreRead less
User-Adaptive Search and Evaluation for Complex Information-Seeking Tasks. This project plans to develop a new evaluation framework to understand and characterise web users and their situation within complex, multi-faceted search tasks, exemplified through job-search. While evaluation of web search engine effectiveness is relatively well understood, measuring information retrieval performance in the context of complex tasks with heterogeneous users is a largely neglected problem. This project pl ....User-Adaptive Search and Evaluation for Complex Information-Seeking Tasks. This project plans to develop a new evaluation framework to understand and characterise web users and their situation within complex, multi-faceted search tasks, exemplified through job-search. While evaluation of web search engine effectiveness is relatively well understood, measuring information retrieval performance in the context of complex tasks with heterogeneous users is a largely neglected problem. This project plans to mine user-specific characteristics and situations from complex profiles and interaction logs for online information services run by the industry partner, SEEK. The new techniques are intended to redefine understanding of task-oriented search, and have the potential to reinvent the user experience for complex search tasks. This project will transform how practical search systems are measured within complex task scenarios. This will result in substantial economic impact by enabling businesses providing task-based search services to provide more customized offerings. Within the target domain (job search), this greatly enhances a service highly relevant to Australia's productivity.Read moreRead less
Spoken conversational search: contextual interactive techniques to support effective information search over a speech-only communication channel. This project will develop new techniques for effective information search using speech only, supporting improved information access for visually impaired people or in situations that require focused visual attention (e.g. driving). The techniques are based on a conversational approach to information search and presentation of results.
Talking about place: tapping human knowledge to enrich national spatial data sets. Place descriptions are a common way for people to describe a location, but no current tools are smart enough to understand them. Emergency call centres are risking lives, users of navigation or web services are frustrated and addressing these problems costs billions of dollars per year. This project comes with a novel, interdisciplinary approach to automatically interpret human place descriptions and will develop ....Talking about place: tapping human knowledge to enrich national spatial data sets. Place descriptions are a common way for people to describe a location, but no current tools are smart enough to understand them. Emergency call centres are risking lives, users of navigation or web services are frustrated and addressing these problems costs billions of dollars per year. This project comes with a novel, interdisciplinary approach to automatically interpret human place descriptions and will develop novel methods to capture placenames with their meaning for smarter databases and automatic interpretation procedures. This acquired knowledge will be an important step forward for Australia's data custodians and users. Australia's location information industry will gain a significant advantage on a highly competitive global market.Read moreRead less
Efficient Compression and Querying Techniques for Massive Text Collections. Web search services have become a fundamental tool used by governments, businesses, and individuals, and play a key role in our access to knowledge and information. In this project we aim to develop new techniques for representing the indexes at the heart of web search services, and to devise new processing algorithms with reduced resource requirements for resolving queries and providing useful and topical answers. Hig ....Efficient Compression and Querying Techniques for Massive Text Collections. Web search services have become a fundamental tool used by governments, businesses, and individuals, and play a key role in our access to knowledge and information. In this project we aim to develop new techniques for representing the indexes at the heart of web search services, and to devise new processing algorithms with reduced resource requirements for resolving queries and providing useful and topical answers. Higher query throughput and reduced storage load will benefit providers though reduced hardware and electricity costs, and will benefit society through better access to information, enhanced opportunities to connect and collaborate, and greater long-term scalability as on-line resources continue to multiply.Read moreRead less
Sub-collection retrieval: understanding and improving search engines. Search engines have become essential in many parts of daily life. This project aims to improve the accuracy of search engines, increasing the productivity of information seeking tasks and reducing frustration with poor search answers, thus improving the current gateway to the world of information.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE140100275
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$392,979.00
Summary
Beyond keyword search for ranked document retrieval. This project will develop novel approaches to efficient and effective ranked text retrieval using a new class of rank-aware algorithms derived from self-indexes. These algorithms can support complex statistical calculations on the fly. Efficient algorithm design for big data is an increasingly important problem as energy costs continue to soar and can now exceed hardware costs for big data consumers such as Google. In this project, two importa ....Beyond keyword search for ranked document retrieval. This project will develop novel approaches to efficient and effective ranked text retrieval using a new class of rank-aware algorithms derived from self-indexes. These algorithms can support complex statistical calculations on the fly. Efficient algorithm design for big data is an increasingly important problem as energy costs continue to soar and can now exceed hardware costs for big data consumers such as Google. In this project, two important problems in web search are explored: real-time indexing and long-form query answering. Using self-index algorithms, this project presents a road map to move beyond simple keyword-based ranked document retrieval, thus allowing us to efficiently meet more demanding information needs of users in the next decade.Read moreRead less