Abstract This paper presents a robust and comprehensive graph-based rank aggregation approach, used to combine results of isolated ranker models in retrieval tasks. The method follows an unsupervised scheme, which is independent of how the isolated ranks are formulated. Our approach is able to combine arbitrary models, defined in terms of different ranking criteria, such as those based on textual, image or hybrid content representations. We reformulate the ad-hoc retrieval problem as a document retrieval based on fusion graphs , which we propose as a new unified representation model capable of merging multiple ranks and expressing inter-relationships of retrieval results automatically. By doing so, we claim that the retrieval system can benefit from learning the manifold structure of datasets, thus leading to more effective results. Another contribution is that our graph-based aggregation formulation, unlike existing approaches, allows for encapsulating contextual information encoded from multiple ranks, which can be directly used for ranking, without further computations and post-processing steps over the graphs. Based on the graphs, a novel similarity retrieval score is formulated using an efficient computation of minimum common subgraphs. Finally, another benefit over existing approaches is the absence of hyperparameters. A comprehensive experimental evaluation was conducted considering diverse well-known public datasets, composed of textual, image, and multimodal documents. Performed experiments demonstrate that our method reaches top performance, yielding better effectiveness scores than state-of-the-art baseline methods and promoting large gains over the rankers being fused, thus demonstrating the successful capability of the proposal in representing queries based on a unified graph-based model of rank fusions.
We propose a novel approach to performing efficient similarity search and classification in high dimensional data. In this framework, the database elements are vectors in a Euclidean space. Given a query vector in the same space, the goal is to find elements of the database that are similar to the query. In our approach, a small number of independent "voters" rank the database elements based on similarity to the query. These rankings are then combined by a highly efficient aggregation algorithm. Our methodology leads both to techniques for computing approximate nearest neighbors and to a conceptually rich alternative to nearest neighbors.One instantiation of our methodology is as follows. Each voter projects all the vectors (database elements and the query) on a random line (different for each voter), and ranks the database elements based on the proximity of the projections to the projection of the query. The aggregation rule picks the database element that has the best median rank. This combination has several appealing features. On the theoretical side, we prove that with high probability, it produces a result that is a (1 + e) factor approximation to the Euclidean nearest neighbor. On the practical side, it turns out to be extremely efficient, often exploring no more than 5 of the data to obtain very high-quality results. This method is also database-friendly, in that it accesses data primarily in a pre-defined order without random accesses, and, unlike other methods for approximate nearest neighbors, requires almost no extra storage. Also, we extend our approach to deal with the k nearest neighbors.We conduct two sets of experiments to evaluate the efficacy of our methods. Our experiments include two scenarios where nearest neighbors are typically employed---similarity search and classification problems. In both cases, we study the performance of our methods with respect to several evaluation criteria, and conclude that they are uniformly excellent, both in terms of quality of results and in terms of efficiency.