Query rewriting in information retrieval: automatic context extraction from local user documents to improve query results

The central objective of research in Information Retrieval (IR) is to discover new techniques to retrieve relevant information in order to satisfy an Information Need. The Information Need is satisfied when relevant information can be provided to the user. In IR, relevance is a fundamental concept which has changed over time, from popular to personal, i.e., what was considered relevant before was information for the whole population, but what is considered relevant now is specific information for each user. Hence, there is a need to connect the behavior of the system to the condition of a particular person and his social context; thereby an interdisciplinary sector called Human-Centered Computing was born. For the modern search engine, the information extracted for the individual user is crucial. According to the Personalized Search (PS), two different techniques are necessary to personalize a search: contextualization (interconnected conditions that occur in an activity), and individualization (characteristics that distinguish an individual). This movement of focus to the individual's need undermines the rigid linearity of the classical model overtaken the ``berry picking'' model which explains that the terms change thanks to the informational feedback received from the search activity introducing the concept of evolution of search terms. The development of Information Foraging theory, which observed the correlations between animal foraging and human information foraging, also contributed to this transformation through attempts to optimize the cost-benefit ratio. This thesis arose from the need to satisfy human individuality when searching for information, and it develops a synergistic collaboration between the frontiers of technological innovation and the recent advances in IR. The search method developed exploits what is relevant for the user by changing radically the way in which an Information Need is expressed, because now it is expressed through the generation of the query and its own context. As a matter of fact the method was born under the pretense to improve the quality of search by rewriting the query based on the contexts automatically generated from a local knowledge base. Furthermore, the idea of optimizing each IR system has led to develop it as a middleware of interaction between the user and the IR system. Thereby the system has just two possible actions: rewriting the query, and reordering the result. Equivalent actions to the approach was described from the PS that generally exploits information derived from analysis of user behavior, while the proposed approach exploits knowledge provided by the user. The thesis went further to generate a novel method for an assessment procedure, according to the "Cranfield paradigm", in order to evaluate this type of IR systems. The results achieved are interesting considering both the effectiveness achieved and the innovative approach undertaken together with the several applications inspired using a local knowledge base.

When Beauty Goes to Sleep: an analysis of the symbolism behind the sleeping beauty tale

Approaching the world of the fairy tale as an adult, one soon realizes that things are not what they once seemed during story time in bed. Something that once appeared so innocent and simple can become rather complex when digging into its origin. A kiss, for example, can mean something else entirely. I can clearly remember my sister, who is ten years older than I am, telling me that the fairy tales I was told had a mysterious hidden meaning I could not understand. I was probably 9 or 10 when she told me that the story of Sleeping Beauty, which I used to love so much in Disney’s rendering, was nothing more than the story of an adolescent girl, with all the necessary steps needed to become a woman, the bleeding of menstruation and the sexual awakening - even though she did not really put it in these terms. This shocking news troubled me for a while, so much so that I haven’t watched that movie since. But in reality it was not fear that my sister had implanted in me: it was curiosity, the feeling that I was missing something terribly important behind the words and images. But it was not until last year during my semester abroad in Germany, where I had the chance to take a very interesting English literature seminar, that I fully understood what I had been looking for all these years. Thanks to what I learned from the work of Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, Vladimir Propp, and many other authors that wrote extensively about the subject, I feel I finally have the right tools to really get to know this fairy tale. But what I also know now is that the message behind fairy tales is not to be searched for behind only one version: on the contrary, since they come from oral traditions and their form was slowly shaped by centuries of recountals and retellings, the more one digs, the more complete the understanding of the tale will be. I will therefore look for Sleeping Beauty’s hidden meaning by looking for the reason why it did stick so consistently throughout time. To achieve this goal, I have organized my analysis in three chapters: in the first chapter, I will analyze the first known literary version of the tale, the French Perceforest, and then compare it with the following Italian version, Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia; in the second chapter, I will focus on the most famous and by now classical literary versions of Sleeping Beauty, La Belle Au Bois Dormant, written by the Frenchman, Perrault, and the German Dornröschen, recorded by the Brothers Grimm’s; finally, in the last chapter, I will analyze Almodovar’s film Talk to Her as a modern rewriting of this tale, which after a closer look, appears closely related to the earliest version of the story, Perceforest.