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Virginia Tech

Augmenting Dynamic Query Expansion in Microblog Texts

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Dynamic query expansion is a method of automatically identifying terms relevant to a target domain based on an incomplete query input. With the explosive growth of online media, such tools are essential for efficient search result refining to track emerging themes in noisy, unstructured text streams. It's crucial for large-scale predictive analytics and decision-making, systems which use open source indicators to find meaningful information rapidly and accurately. The problems of information overload and semantic mismatch are systemic during the Information Retrieval (IR) tasks undertaken by such systems. In this dissertation, we develop approaches to dynamic query expansion algorithms that can help improve the efficacy of such systems using only a small set of seed queries and requires no training or labeled samples. We primarily investigate four significant problems related to the retrieval and assessment of event-related information, viz. (1) How can we adapt the query expansion process to support rank-based analysis when tracking a fixed set of entities? A scalable framework is essential to allow relative assessment of emerging themes such as airport threats. (2) What visual knowledge discovery framework to adopt that can incorporate users' feedback back into the search result refinement process? A crucial step to efficiently integrate real-time `situational awareness' when monitoring specific themes using open source indicators. (3) How can we contextualize query expansions? We focus on capturing semantic relatedness between a query and reference text so that it can quickly adapt to different target domains. (4) How can we synchronously perform knowledge discovery and characterization (unstructured to structured) during the retrieval process? We mainly aim to model high-order, relational aspects of event-related information from microblog texts.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science and Applications
Department dc:contributor.department
Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2018

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Khandpur, Rupinder P.
Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Ramakrishnan, Naren
  • Lu, Chang-Tien
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Han, Eui-Hong
  • North, Christopher L.
  • Reddy, Chandan K.

Subjects

dc:subject × 4

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:16706
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/84852

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Khandpur, Rupinder P.. Augmenting Dynamic Query Expansion in Microblog Texts. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/84852