5920810
Time-dependent semantic similarity measure of queries using historical click-through data
It has become a promising direction to measure similarity of Web search queries by mining the increasing amount of click-through data logged by Web search engines, which record the interactions between users and the search engines. Most existing approaches employ the click-through data for similarity measure of queries with little consideration of the temporal factor, while the click-through data is often dynamic and contains rich temporal information. In this paper we present a new framework of time-dependent query semantic similarity model on exploiting the temporal characteristics of historical click-through data. The intuition is that more accurate semantic similarity values between queries can be obtained by taking into account the timestamps of the log data. With a set of user-defined calendar schema and calendar patterns, our time-dependent query similarity model is constructed using the marginalized kernel technique, which can exploit both explicit similarity and implicit semantics from the click-through data effectively. Experimental results on a large set of click-through data acquired from a commercial search engine show that our time-dependent query similarity model is more accurate than the existing approaches. Moreover, we observe that our time-dependent query similarity model can, to some extent, reflect real-world semantics such as real-world events that are happening over time.
7331201
Webpage importance analysis using conditional Markov random walk
In this paper, we propose a novel method to calculate the Web page importance based on a conditional Markov random walk model. The main assumption in this model is that given the hyperlinks in a Web page, users are not really randomly clicking one of them. Instead, many factors may bias their behaviors, for example, the anchor text, the content relevance and the previous experiences when visiting the Web site that a destination page belongs to. As one of the results, the user might tend to visit those pages in high-quality Web sites with higher probability. To implement this idea, we reformulate the Web graph to be a two-layer structure, and the Web page importance is calculated by conditional random walk in this new Web graph. Experiments on the topic distillation task of TREC 2003 Web track showed that our new method can achieve about 18% improvement on mean average precision (MAP) and 16% on precision at 10 (P@10) over the PageRank algorithm.
21449211
Effective Feature Extraction for Play Detection in American Football Video
The fact that a typical broadcast can last over 3 hours for a game of 60 minutes makes video summarization of American football games most desirable. In this paper, we present several feature extraction methods for play detection in American football video. Wavelet based motion analysis is used to extract the trend component from the noisy motion vectors; a hybrid field-color model detects field area with both high accuracy and fast speed; and a prior knowledge driven line detection method uses the court information to estimate miss-detections. Based on the so-extracted features, a boosting chain is used for feature selection and decision making. Tested on large-size video data, the detection performance of our work is very promising.
1733796
Event detection from evolution of click-through data
Previous efforts on event detection from the web have focused primarily on web content and structure data ignoring the rich collection of web log data. In this paper, we propose the first approach to detect events from the click-through data, which is the log data of web search engines. The intuition behind event detection from click-through data is that such data is often event-driven and each event can be represented as a set ofquery-page pairs that are not only semantically similar but also have similar evolution pattern over time. Given the click-through data, in our proposed approach, we first segment it into a sequence of bipartite graphs based on theuser-defined time granularity. Next, the sequence of bipartite graphs is represented as a vector-based graph, which records the semantic and evolutionary relationships between queries and pages. After that, the vector-based graph is transformed into its dual graph, where each node is a query-page pair that will be used to represent real world events. Then, the problem of event detection is equivalent to the problem of clustering the dual graph of the vector-based graph. The clustering process is based on a two-phase graph cut algorithm. In the first phase, query-page pairs are clustered based on thesemantic-based similarity such that each cluster in the result corresponds to a specific topic. In the second phase, query-page pairs related to the same topic are further clustered based on the evolution pattern-based similarity such that each cluster is expected to represent a specific event under the specific topic. Experiments with real click-through data collected from a commercial web search engine show that the proposed approach produces high quality results.
5237024
Time-constraint boost for TV commercials detection
Commercials detection is very important for TV broadcast analysis. However, independent classification of video shots is very difficult because a considerable portion of individual commercial shots look very much like the programs. In this paper, the authors proposed a novel way to tackle this problem: to dependently treat successive video shots and improve the final classification performance by considering their temporal coherence. Following this idea, the authors discussed how to apply the majority-based windowing and minority-based merging techniques to the training and test process of statistical classifiers. As a result, a new algorithm named time-constraint boost is proposed. Simulation results show that this algorithm can improve both the training and generalization performance and lead to a promising commercials detection accuracy.
20330655
Site abstraction for rare category classification in large-scale web directory
Automatically classifying the Web directories is an effective way to manage Web information. However, our experiments showed that the state-of-the-art text classification technologies could not lead to acceptable performance in this task. Due to our analysis, the main problem is the lack of effective training data in rare categories of Web directories. To tackle this problem, we proposed a novel technology named Site Abstraction to synthesize new training examples from the website of the existing training document. The main idea is to propagate features through parent-child relationship in the sitemap tree. Experiments showed that our method significantly improved the classification performance.
6716050
Semantic manifold learning for image retrieval
Learning the user's semantics for CBIR involves two different sources of information: the similarity relations entailed by the content-based features, and the relevance relations specified in the feedback. Given that, we propose an augmented relation embedding (ARE) to map the image space into a semantic manifold that faithfully grasps the user's preferences. Besides ARE, we also look into the issues of selecting a good feature set for improving the retrieval performance. With these two aspects of efforts we have established a system that yields far better results than those previously reported. Overall, our approach can be characterized by three key properties: 1) The framework uses one relational graph to describe the similarity relations, and the other two to encode the relevant/irrelevant relations indicated in the feedback. 2) With the relational graphs so defined, learning a semantic manifold can be transformed into solving a constrained optimization problem, and is reduced to the ARE algorithm accounting for both the representation and the classification points of views. 3) An image representation based on augmented features is introduced to couple with the ARE learning. The use of these features is significant in capturing the semantics concerning different scales of image regions. We conclude with experimental results and comparisons to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
6173141
Approximate tree matching and shape similarity
We present a framework for 2D shape contour (silhouette) comparison that can account for stretchings, occlusions and region information. Topological changes due to the original 3D scenarios and articulations are also addressed. To compare the degree of similarity between any two shapes, our approach is to represent each shape contour with a free tree structure derived from a shape axis (SA) model, which we have recently proposed. We then use a tree matching scheme to find the best approximate match and the matching cost. To deal with articulations, stretchings and occlusions, three local tree matching operations, merge, cut, and merge-and-cut, are introduced to yield optimally approximate matches, which can accommodate not only one-to-one but many-to-many mappings. The optimization process gives guaranteed globally optimal match efficiently. Experimental results on a variety of shape contours are provided.
122073
Fast Object Detection with Occlusions
We describe a new framework, based on boosting algorithms and cascade structures, to efficiently detect objects/faces with occlusions. While our approach is motivated by the work of Viola and Jones, several techniques have been developed for establishing a more general system, including (i) a robust boosting scheme, to select useful weak learners and to avoid overfitting; (ii) reinforcement training, to reduce false-positive rates via a more effective training procedure for boosted cascades; and (iii) cascading with evidence, to extend the system to handle occlusions, without compromising in detection speed. Experimental results on de- tecting faces under various situations are provided to demonstrate the performances of the proposed method.
6416068
Shape recognition using fast boosted filtering
We address the problem of recognizing 2-D shapes in images via multi-class classifications. Our approach has three key elements. First, a signed distance transform is introduced to represent a shape more informatively. Second, a filter bank is generated such that its filters can capture multiple-scale local and global features between two shapes of different classes. We then apply boosting to combine useful filters to construct discriminant classifiers. Third, in implementing our system, a new classification architecture is developed to accomplish multi-class recognition. To examine the claimed efficiencies, we consider an example of document recognition by pinpointing the strengths of our method through experimental results and comparisons.
1579121
Representation and self-similarity of shapes
Representing shapes is a significant problem for vision systems that must recognize or classify objects. We derive a representation for a given shape by investigating its self-similarities, and constructing its shape axis (SA) and shape axis tree (SA-tree). We start with a shape, its boundary contour, and two different parameterizations for the contour. To measure its self-similarity we consider matching pairs of points (and their tangents) along the boundary contour, i.e., matching the two parameterizations. The matching, of self-similarity criteria may vary, e.g., co-circularity, parallelism, distance, region homogeneity. The loci of middle points of the pairing contour points are the shape axis and they can be grouped into a unique tree graph, the SA-tree. The shape axis for the co-circularity criteria is compared to the symmetry axis. An interpretation in terms of object parts is also presented.