1979432
Using Fault Injection and Modeling to Evaluate the Performability of Cluster-Based Services
We propose a two-phase methodology for quantifying the performability (performance and availability) of cluster-based Internet services. In the first phase, evaluators use a fault-injection infrastructure to measure the impact of faults on the server's performance. In the second phase, evaluators use an analytical model to combine an expected fault load with measurements from the first phase to assess the server's performability. Using this model, evaluators can study the server's sensitivity to different design decisions, fault rates, and environmental factors. To demonstrate our methodology, we study the performability of 4 versions of the PRESS Web server against 5 classes of faults, quantifying the effects of different design decisions on performance and availability. Finally, to further show the utility of our model, we also quantify the impact of two hypothetical changes, reduced human operator response time and the use of RAIDs.
11674907
An Analytic Model Predicting the Optimal Range for Maximizing 1-Hop Broadcast Coverage in Dense Wireless Networks
We present an analytic model to predict the optimal range for maximizing 1-hop broadcast coverage in dense ad-hoc wireless networks, using information like network density and node sending rate. We first derive a geometric-based, probabilistic model that describes the expected coverage as a function of range, sending rate and density. Because we can only solve the resulting equations numerically, we next develop extrapolations that find the optimum range for any rate and density given a single precomputed optimum. Finally using simulation, we show that in spite of many simplifications in the model, our extrapolation is able to predict the optimal range to within 16%.
16393547
A new robust relevance model in the language model framework
In this paper, a new robust relevance model is proposed that can be applied to both pseudo and true relevance feedback in the language-modeling framework for document retrieval. There are at least three main differences between our new relevance model and other relevance models. The proposed model brings back the original query into the relevance model by treating it as a short, special document, in addition to a number of top-ranked documents returned from the first round retrieval for pseudo feedback, or a number of relevant documents for true relevance feedback. Second, instead of using a uniform prior as in the original relevance model proposed by Lavrenko and Croft, documents are assigned with different priors according to their lengths (in terms) and ranks in the first round retrieval. Third, the probability of a term in the relevance model is further adjusted by its probability in a background language model. In both pseudo and true relevance cases, we have compared the performance of our model to that of the two baselines: the original relevance model and a linear combination model. Our experimental results show that the proposed new model outperforms both of the two baselines in terms of mean average precision.
15133148
Modeling Image Data for Effective Indexing and Retrieval in Large General Image Databases
In this paper, we propose an image semantic model based on the knowledge and criteria in the field of linguistics and taxonomy. Our work bridges the "semantic gap" by seamlessly exploiting the synergy of both visual feature processing and semantic relevance computation in a new way, and provides improved query efficiency and effectiveness for large general image databases. Our main contributions are as follows: we design novel data structures, namely, a lexical hierarchy, an image-semantic hierarchy, and a number of atomic semantic domains, to capture the semantics and the features of the database, and to provide the indexing scheme. We present a novel image query algorithm based on the proposed structures. In addition, we propose a novel term expansion mechanism to improve the lexical processing. Our extensive experiments indicate that our proposed techniques are effective in achieving high runtime performance with improved retrieval accuracy. The experiments also show that the proposed method has good scalability.
25240485
An Image-Semantic Ontological Framework for Large Image Databases
In the past decade, the Internet has rapidly become a most prevalent platform for information sharing and data communications all over the world. This trend has been enhanced by the wide proliferation of home-used digital photos and videos. Although the Web has seen numerous applications for photo storage, sharing, and searching, few image retrieval systems provide satisfactory search service. The so-called semantic gap and curse of dimensionality are two major barriers that existing technologies cannot adequately address. In this paper, we propose a framework to achieve effective and efficient content-base retrieval on images by addressing the above two issues. That is, we need to narrow the semantic gap while mitigating the curse of dimensionality.
17810621
Enhancing Relevance Models with Adaptive Passage Retrieval
Passage retrieval and pseudo relevance feedback/query expansion have been reported as two effective means for improving document retrieval in literature. Relevance models, while improving retrieval in most cases, hurts performance on some heterogeneous collections. Previous research has shown that combining passage-level evidence with pseudo relevance feedback brings added benefits. In this paper, we study passage retrieval with relevance models in the language-modeling framework for document retrieval. An adaptive passage retrieval approach is proposed to document ranking based on the best passage of a document given a query. The proposed passage ranking method is applied to two relevance-based language models: the Lavrenko-Croft relevance model and our robust relevance model. Experiments are carried out with three query sets on three different collections from TREC. Our experimental results show that combining adaptive passage retrieval with relevance models (particularly the robust relevance model) consistently outperforms solely applying relevance models on full-length document retrieval.
2304647
Evaluating Question-Answering Techniques in Chinese
An important first step in developing a cross-lingual question answering system is to understand whether techniques developed with English text will also work with other languages, such as Chinese. The Marsha Chinese question answering system described in this paper uses techniques similar to those used in the English systems developed for TREC. Marsha consists of three main components: the query processing module, the Hanquery search engine, and the answer extraction module. It also contains some specific techniques dealing with Chinese language characteristics, such as word segmentation and ordinals processing. Evaluation of the system is done using a method based on the TREC question-answering track. The results of the evaluation show that the performance of Marsha is comparable to some English question answering systems in TREC 8 track. An English language version of Marsha further indicates that the heuristics used are applicable to the English question answering task.