Information Retrieval Lab

1
Information Retrieval Lab

• DiSCo University of Milan Bicocca viale Sarca
  336
• Head Prof. Gabriella Pasi

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The IR Lab in brief

• The Information Retrieval Group (IRG) was
  established in 2005 at DiSCo, University of Milan
  Bicocca.
• Today the amount of information available on the
  Web has increased to a point that there are great
  demands for effective systems that allow an easy
  and flexible access to information relevant to
  specific users needs. By flexibility is here
  meant the capability of the system to both manage
  imperfect (vague and/or uncertain) information,
  and to adapt its behaviour to the user context.
• The research activity undertaken by the
  Information Retrieval group is aimed at defining
  models and techniques that improve the
  limitations of current systems for the
  Information Access (mainly Information Retrieval
  and Information Filtering systems).
• In particular the problems of context modeling
  and personalization are addressed.

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IR Lab numbers

• Small but active!
• One scientist
• Two external collaborators
• Three workplaces for Students and Collaborators
• About 50 articles in proceeding of international
  conferences and in international journals in the
  last three years
• 4-5 master students per year

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IR Lab Activity

• Research areas
• Information Retrieval
• Information Filtering
• XML Retrieval
• Web Intelligence
• Application Domains
• Large document repositories
• World Wide Web

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The problem of automatic access to information
Two main types of systems to locate information
relevant to users needs

• Information Retrieval Systems (Search Engines)

An explicit query formulation

• Information Filtering Systems

users profiles, i.e. descriptions of specific
users needs dinamically updated also on the
basis of the users behaviour (no explicit user
query! Push technology)
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Basic structure of an IRS
Off line
On line
An IRS is based on a mathematical model
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Information Filtering
Information Filtering is the process of
monitoring large amounts of dynamically generated
information and pushing to a user the subset of
information likely to be of her/his interest
(based on her/his information needs).
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Information Filtering

• An IFS needs an information filter that, when
  applied to an information item, evaluates whether
  the item is of interest or not to the considered
  user.

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XML Retrieval

• IR systems can be used for the content-based
  retrieval of documents encoded in XML, SGML, and
  HTML. In these collections it is important to
  retrieve documents content and stucture following
  the user's needs.
• Search and retrieval can be supported through ad
  hoc indexing strategies.
• This research area studies and proposes advanced
  solutions for storing, managing and retrieving
  structured documents, with particular focus on
  XML documents.

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Web Intelligence

• Web Intelligence (WI) exploits AI and advanced
  information technology on the Web and Internet.
  It is the key and the most urgent research field
  of IT for business intelligence.

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A multiple criteria decision model for
Information Filtering

• www.peng-project.org
• Project Coordinator Gabriella Pasi
• Partners ATOS Origin (SP), UJF (FR), USG (UK),
  USI (SW), RTSI (SW)
• Objective
• The PENG Project (2004-2006 IST-2003-004597) had
  the objective of defining and developing a news
  content composition and programming environment
  so as to provide news professionals and general
  users with an interactive and personalised tool
  for news gathering and delivery. This tool is
  conceived as a flexible system for a personalised
  filtering, retrieval and composition of news.

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Personalized Filtering Module pushes news or
clusters relevant to a user interests to each
user (where each user may have multiple
overlapping interests). The matching function
applied by the filter is personalised to the user
and performs the combined evaluation of each news
with respect to five matching criteria
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IR Lab people

• Gabriella Pasi
• Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory
• Stefania Marrara
• Junior Research Fellow
• Célia Cristina Pereira
• Junior Research Fellow

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Conferences and Events

• Open Conferences (2008)
• "Special Track on Information Access and
  Retrieval Systems, within the ACM Symposium on
  Applied Computing, (Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil,
  March 16 - 20, 2008).  IAR2008
• Past Events (since 2005)
• International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and
  Applications (WILF 2007), Hotel Portofino Kulm,
  Portofino Vetta - Ruta di Camogli, Genova (Italy)
  - July 7-10, 2007
• PhD School on Web Information Retrieval, WebBar
  2007 Varenna, Italy, 26th August-1st September
  2007.
• Imprecision, Uncertainty and Fuzziness in
  Databases area at the 23rd International
  Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE07).
  Istanbul, Turkey April 17-20, 2007
• Seventh International Conference on Flexible
  Query Answering Systems (FQAS 2006), Milano, 2-10
  June 2006.
• "Special Track on Information Access and
  Retrieval Systems, within the ACM Symposium on
  Applied Computing, (Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil,
  March 16 - 20, 2008, Dijon France March 2006,
  Santa Fe - New Mexico 13-17 March 2005, Cyprus
  14-17 March 2004, Melbourne - Florida 9-12 March
  2003, Madrid 10-14 March 2002).  IAR2008
• 3rd International Summer School on Aggregation
  Operators, Università della Svizzera Italiana
  (USI-Lugano), Lugano, 10-15 July 2005

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Recent Publications

• Edited Volumes
• E. Herrera-Viedma, F. Crestani and G. Pasi Soft
  Computing for Web Information Retrieval, edited
  by Physica Verlag, series Studies in Fuzziness
  2006.
• G. Pasi Flexible Query Answering Systems,
  Proceedings of the 7th International Conference
  FQAS 2006, Milan, Italy, June 2006,  Springer
  Verlag, LNAI 4027.
• F. Masulli, S. Mitra and G. Pasi Applications
  if Fuzzy Sets Theory, Proceedings of the
  International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and
  Applications, Ruta di Camogli, Italy, July 2007, 
  Springer Verlag, LNAI 4578.
• Special Issues
• Allel-Adjali, P. Bosc and G. Pasi eds. Flexible
  Queries in Information Systems of the Journal of
  Intelligent Information Systems, to appear, 2008.
• E. Herrera-Viedma and G. Pasi eds."Aggregation
  Operators for Information Systems, of the
  International Journal of Intelligent Systems, to
  appear, 2008.
• E. Herrera-Viedma and G. Pasi eds. "Soft
  Approaches to Information Retrieval and
  Information Access on the Web", of the Journal of
  the American Society for Information Science,
  2006.

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Recent Publications

• Papers in International Journals. 
• A. Campi, E. Damiani, S. Guinea, S. Marrara, G.
  Pasi, P. Spoletini, A Fuzzy Extension for the
  XPath Query Language, International Journal of
  Intelligent Systems, to appear in 2008.
• G.Bordogna, G.Pasi, A flexible model for the
  evaluation of soft Conditional Preferences in
  fuzzy databases International Journal of
  Intelligent Systems, to appear in 2008.
• G. Bordogna, G. Pasi, A flexible approach to
  evaluating soft conditions with unequal
  preferences in fuzzy databases, Special Topic
  Issue on Advances in Fuzzy Database Technology,
  International Journal of Intelligent Systems,
  Vol. 22, Issue 7, pp. 665-689, July 2007.
• M. Baziz, M Boughanem, G. Pasi, H. Prade, A
  fuzzy logic approach to information retrieval
  using an ontology-based representation of
  documents, International Journal of Applied
  Mathematics and Computer Science (AMCS), to
  appear in 2008.
• E. Herrera-Viedma, and G. Pasi, "Soft Approaches
  to Information Retrieval and Information Access
  on the Web an introduction to the special topic
  section" of  the Journal of the American Society
  for Information Science and Technology, JASIST
  57(4) 511-514, 2006.
• E. Herrera-Viedma, G. Pasi, A.G. Lopez-Herrera,
  C. Porcel, Evaluating the Information Quality of
  Web Sites A Methodology Based on Fuzzy Computing
  with Words  Journal of the American Society of
  Information Science, JASIST 57(4) 538-549, 2006.
  
• G. Pasi and R.R Yager, Modeling the concept of
  majority opinion in group decision making
  Information Sciences, Volume 176, Issue 4, pp.
  390-414, February 22, 2006.
• K. Atanassov,  G. Pasi, R.R. Yager,
  "Intuitionistic fuzzy interpretations of
  multi-criteria multi-person and multi-measurement
  tool decision making", International Journal of
  Systems Science, Vol. 36, n. 14, pp. 859-868,
  November 2005.
• G. Bordogna and G. Pasi, Personalized Indexing
  and Retrieval of Heterogeneous Structured
  Documents, Information Retrieval, Kluwer, Vol. 8,
  Issue 2, pp. 301-318, April 2005.
• R.A. Marques Pereira, A. Molinari, G. Pasi,
  Contextual weighted representations and indexing
  models for the retrieval of HTML documents, Soft
  Computing, Vol. 9, Issue 7, pp. 481-492, July
  2005.

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Recent Publications

• Chapters of International Books
• G. Pasi, Fuzzy Models, Encyclopedia of Database
  Systems, Ling Liu and M. Tamer Özsu (Eds.),
  Springer, to appear, 2008.
• M. Fedrizzi and G. Pasi, Fuzzy Approaches to
  Consensus Modelling in Group Decision Making, in
  Intelligent Decision and Policy Making Support
  Systems (D. Ruan, F. Hardeman, K. van der Meer
  eds.), Springer, to appear 2008
• G. Bordogna, M. Pagani, G. Pasi An Incremental
  Hierarchical Fuzzy Clustering for Category-based
  News Filtering, in "Uncertainty and Intelligent
  Information Systems" (B. Bouchon-Meunier, R.R.
  Yager, C. Marsala, and M. Rifqi eds), World
  Scientific, ISBN 978-981-279-234-1, 2008.
• G. Bordogna, D.H. Kraft, G. Pasi, Soft Approaches
  to Information Access and Retrieval, in The
  Handbook of Granular Computing, G., Witold
  Pedrycz, Andrzej Skowron, and Vladik Kreinovich
  Co-editors, John Wiley Sons, Ltd., 2008.
• G. Pasi, Fuzzy Sets in Information Retrieval
  State of the Art and Research trends, In Fuzzy
  Sets and Their Extensions Representation,
  Aggregation and Models. Intelligent Systems from
  Decision Making to Data Mining, Web Intelligence
  and Computer Vision,  (H. Bustince, F. Herrera,
  J. Montero eds.), series Studies in Fuzziness and
  Soft Computing, Springer Verlag, Vol. 220, 2008.
• G.Bordogna, M.Pagani, G.Pasi, G.Psaila, Flexible
  location-based spatial queries in Theoretical
  Advances and Applications of Fuzzy Logic and Soft
  Computing, Oscar Castillo, Patricia Melin, Oscar
  Montiel Ross, Roberto Sepulveda Cruz, Witold
  Pedrycz, Janusz Kacprzyk Eds, ISBN 3540724338,
  Sprinter Verlag, 42, Advances in Soft Computing
  series, 36-45, 2007.
• G. Bordogna, M. Pagani, G. Pasi, A Flexible
  decision support approach to model ill-defined
  knowledge in GISs. In AAVV. Geographic
  Uncertainty in Environmental Security, Book
  Series NATO Security through Science Series, (pp.
  133-152). ISBN 978-1-4020-6436-4. doi
  10.1007/978-1-4020-6438-8 (NETHERLANDS), 2007.
• G. Bordogna, M. Pagani, G.Pasi, A dynamical
  Hierarchical fuzzy clustering algorithm for
  document filtering, in Soft Computing in Web
  Information Retrieval (E. Herrera-Viedma, G.
  Pasi, F. Crestani eds.), series Studies in
  Fuzziness and Soft Computing, Springer Verlag,
  Vol. 197, 1-23, 2006.
• M. Baziz, M. Boughanem, G. Pasi, A fuzzy logic
  approach to information retrieval using an
  ontology-based representation of documents, in
  Fuzzy Logic and the Semantic Web" (E. Sanchez,
  Ed.), Elsevier Science, pp. 363-377, March 2006.