QueryBuilder: Human-in-the-Loop Query Development for Information Retrieval
This addresses the challenge of query development for cross-lingual information retrieval, particularly for novice users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing interactive and neural retrieval methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling novice users to efficiently create cross-lingual information retrieval queries by introducing QueryBuilder, an interactive system that uses human feedback to refine queries, resulting in users forming useful queries in under 10 minutes per sub-topic.
Frequently, users of an Information Retrieval (IR) system start with an overarching information need (a.k.a., an analytic task) and proceed to define finer-grained queries covering various important aspects (i.e., sub-topics) of that analytic task. We present a novel, interactive system called $\textit{QueryBuilder}$, which allows a novice, English-speaking user to create queries with a small amount of effort, through efficient exploration of an English development corpus in order to rapidly develop cross-lingual information retrieval queries corresponding to the user's information needs. QueryBuilder performs near real-time retrieval of documents based on user-entered search terms; the user looks through the retrieved documents and marks sentences as relevant to the information needed. The marked sentences are used by the system as additional information in query formation and refinement: query terms (and, optionally, event features, which capture event $'triggers'$ (indicator terms) and agent/patient roles) are appropriately weighted, and a neural-based system, which better captures textual meaning, retrieves other relevant content. The process of retrieval and marking is repeated as many times as desired, giving rise to increasingly refined queries in each iteration. The final product is a fine-grained query used in Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR). Our experiments using analytic tasks and requests from the IARPA BETTER IR datasets show that with a small amount of effort (at most 10 minutes per sub-topic), novice users can form $\textit{useful}$ fine-grained queries including in languages they don't understand. QueryBuilder also provides beneficial capabilities to the traditional corpus exploration and query formation process. A demonstration video is released at https://vimeo.com/734795835