Survey and implementation of SEO techniques [assigned @ Hayden Mills; one

more place available]

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) aims to tweak web pages to increase their ranking on a target
search engine, e.g. Google. SEO is a large market and is based on “black-magic”; SEO experts
have suggested a number of techniques to guarantee to be ranked on top positions, some of these
are trivial, others are no-where near what a search engine like Google would care about, others
do make sense. All techniques have in common that their effectiveness has not been empirically
demonstrated nor scientifically investigated.

In this project, you will go through the relevant literature regarding SEO, including some of the
non-academic, gray-literature books that have been published. You will collect the techniques
that have been put forward for SEO, along with any evidence of their effectiveness. In the second
part of the project, you will implement (preferably in Python) a number of the techniques you
have surveyed and test them across a collection of web pages. We do not ask you collect as yet
the effectiveness of these techniques in a formal way, but ensure that the techniques you
implemented are working correctly.

Tasks:

1. survey the literature and write a short summary of the techniques that have been proposed
2. implement selected techniques
3. setup a test collection to test the effectiveness of the techniques

This project is unlikely to produce a publication within the scope of the project or within short
time from its conclusion.

A study of Health Cards

When searching for health information online, Google at times displays so called Health Cards,
i.e. a collection of summarised, highly curated information related to a symptom, condition or
disease.

This project will explore:

1. what triggers an health card: given a wide range of health search queries, you will record
whether an health card is triggered. At this stage, you will also record the health card
2. what information is in an health card?
3. are health cards tackling the right conditions? You will use the data collected above, to
study whether the health card is relevant to the symptom, condition or disease. You may
required help from a medical expert for this (we provide you with this), but you still will
 have to facilitate the medical expert in his analysis (may need to develop a small interface
for the expert to evaluate the correctness).
4. how are health cards helping users taking decisions, and are they improving the decision?
In this part you will devise a user study for evaluating the effectiveness of the health
cards. You will not run the user study (if not for testing the protocol), but you will have to
setup an appropriate system and protocol. (This may require the development of
appropriate web interfaces).

This project requires the development of data acquisition methods, in Python, along with data
analysis methods, both in Python and R.

This project may produce a small publication at the end of the project, or in the immediate period
after the project is concluded.

Simulating Users to Train Systems

Recent advances in user modelling have resulted in the creation of models that can be used to
simulate user behaviour related to querying, clicking/assessing and stopping search. It has been
argued that these models could be used to evaluate search effectiveness.

In this project, we take a different view and are interested to explore the use of these models to
generate data to train learning-based search engines such as learning to rank systems and deep
learning systems. These systems in fact showed promising search effectiveness, but require a
large quantity of training data, which is often impossible to acquire for small, specialised search
engines (think about domain specific), and also for academic and research purposes.

The tasks in this project are:

1. implement user simulation models. Some of these models have been already
implemented by a third party (Java or Python)
2. implement and deploy learning to rank and deep learning models. Some of these models
(learning to rank) are available in tools such as Terrier, but others are not and require
implementation. (Java and Python)
3. devise experiments to train models with simulated data and evaluate them on real data,
available in existing test collections
4. evaluate the models under different conditions and write up the results in a professional
manner

This project may produce a publication at the end of the project, or in the immediate period after
the project is concluded; however the implementation and empirical work is quite large, thus
there may be not enough time to work on a publication within the scope of the internship
Integrating Complex Operations with Word Embeddings into Retrieval Models
[assigned @ Nathan O’Sullivan]

Word Embeddings are a technique to represent words and phrases by mapping them to vectors of
real numbers. Popular examples of these techniques are skipgrams and Glove. We have devised a
technique to exploit word embeddings to improve retrieval, calledn NTLM (ADCS 2015 paper).
This project will expand that work by considering complex operations with word embeddings
(e.g. sums and subtractions to represent negations, aggregations to encode the meaning of
entities, etc).

The tasks in this project are:

1. familiarise with existing Java code that implements NTLM

2. implement the complex operations with word embeddings and integrate them into
retrieval methods. These include: negation, aggregation, analogy.
3. Devise and execute a set of IR experiments to formally evaluate the models
4. write up the results in a professional manner

This project may produce a publication at the end of the project, or in the immediate period after
the project is concluded.

Using Word Embeddings for Stemming

This project will consider the use of word embedding representations to perform stemming of
text in documents. Stemming refers to the practice of conflating multiple variations of a root
word to its stem: for example applying stemming to play, plays, playing returns the stem
play. Popular stemming algorithms include Portern and Krovetz stemming; these are rule-based
stemming methods. Statistical stemmers do exist.

Word Embeddings are a technique to represent words and phrases by mapping them to vectors of
real numbers. Popular examples of these techniques are Skipgrams and Glove. Word embeddings
methods allow to perform operations with these vector representations. One such operation is
analogy. For example, the expression man : woman = king : ?x can be evaluated as ?x =
argmax(woman - man + king). Our idea is to use the same concept beyond the analogy
operation to learn representations of words that share similar stems. The project will thoroughly
study how this novel approach to stemming influences retrieval effectiveness.

The tasks in this project are:

1. Formally define the word embedding stemming technique

2. Implement this novel technique and integrate it within a search engine toolkit like Terrier
or Lucene/Elastic
3. Review existing stemming techniques
 4. Identify implementations of these techniques in the selected search engine toolkit;
implement missing techniques
5. Formally evaluate the stemming techniques and analysis the effect of the word
embeddings stemming method

This project may produce a publication at the end of the project, or in the immediate period after
the project is concluded.

Literature Review on Table Search (with possible extension)

Table search refers to the retrieval of tables in answer to natural languege queries. This project
will produce a thorough, formal literature review and summay of table search techniques, and
related methods (e.g., table mining, table extension, and table completion).

This project is highly likely to produce a publication at the end of the project, or in the
immediate period after the project is concluded. Because of the nature of this project, the ideal
candidate will have strong English writing skills (please demonstrate this at the moment of
applying).

This project may be further extended in a subsequent project that implements identified methods
and formally evaluates and compares them.

Literature Reviews on Selected topics in Information Retrieval

This project is specifically designed for IFN701 students that intend to undertake an academic
literature review. In this project you will choose from one of the IR topics/problems listed below
(or propose a topic of your own) and perform a rigourous literature review which includes:
define the protocol for the review, analyse research publications, compile an annotated
bibliography, write up a review of the selected literature.

Topics/problems include:

• Consumer Health Search (read here for detials)

• Medical Information Retrieval (read here for detials)
• Automatic creation of systematic reviews using IR, NLP and text mining
• Stemming techniques, including statistical stemming
• Methods for the computation of semantic similarity

Systematic Evaluation of Open Source Search Engines

This project will perform a thorough, systematic evaluation of open source search engines,
including (but not limited to) Terrier, Lucene/Sorl, Indri, Elasticsearch. Prior work has been
published in this area. The project will first review this prior work, identifying common trends
among them, along with limitations. Then, an evaluation protocol will be defined, including the
selection of test collections, evaluation measures (both for effectiveness and efficiency), etc.

This project is highly likely to produce a publication at the end of the project, or in the
immediate period after the project is concluded. Because of the nature of this project, the ideal
candidate will have good English writing skills (please demonstrate this at the moment of
applying).

A software package for information retrieval evaluation

Evaluation is paramount for IR research. Many evaluation measures exist, each modelling users
in a different way and exploring different properties of tasks and interactions. Evaluation
measures have been coded up in a number of software packages that are used by the IR
community: trec_eval, ndeval, gdeval, inst_eval, UBIRE. Each of these tools implement only a
limited subset of measures, requires different inputs, use different syntax, etc. Direct
programmatic integration is often not possible.

This project will develop a new tool for IR evaluation, aiming to:

• provide a reference, complete implementation of IR measures

• support different formats of runs, qrels
• provide APIs endpoints so that the tool could be used programmatically
• include statistical significance testing methods
• include parameter tuning methods like cross validation and loocv

This software should be implemented in Python.