Damien Palacio
University of Zurich
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Publication
Featured researches published by Damien Palacio.
International Journal on Digital Libraries | 2010
Damien Palacio; Guillaume Cabanac; Christian Sallaberry; Gilles Hubert
Search engines for Digital Libraries allow users to retrieve documents according to their contents. They process documents without differentiating the manifold aspects of information. Spatial and temporal dimensions are particularly dismissed. These dimensions are, however, of great interest for users of search engines targeting either the Web or specialized Digital Libraries. Recent studies reported that nearly 20% queries convey spatial and temporal information in addition to topical information. These three dimensions were referred to as parts of “geographic information.” In the literature, search engines handling those dimensions are called “Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) systems.” Although several initiatives for evaluating GIR systems were undertaken, none was concerned with evaluating these three dimensions altogether. In this article, we address this issue by designing an evaluation framework, usefulness of which is highlighted through a case study involving a test collection and a GIR system. This framework allowed the comparison of our GIR system to state-of-the-art topical approaches. We also performed experiments for measuring performance improvement stemming from each dimension or their combination. We show that combining the three dimensions yields improvement in effectiveness (+73.9%) over a common topical baseline. Moreover, rather than conveying redundancy, the three dimensions complement each other.
SDH | 2012
Damien Palacio; Christian Sallaberry; Mauro Gaio
Our contribution is dedicated to geographic information contained in unstructured textual documents. The main focus of this article is to propose a general indexing strategy that is dedicated to spatial information, but which could be applied to temporal and thematic information as well. More specifically, we have developed a process flow that indexes the spatial information contained in textual documents. This process flow interprets spatial information and computes corresponding accurate footprints. Our goal is to normalize such heterogeneous grained and scaled spatial information (points, polylines, polygons). This normalization is carried out at the index level by grouping spatial information together within spatial areas and by using statistics to compute frequencies for such areas and weights for the retrieved documents.
theory and practice of digital libraries | 2011
Gilles Hubert; Guillaume Cabanac; Christian Sallaberry; Damien Palacio
Search engines allow users to retrieve documents with respect to a given query. These provide advanced search options, such as query operators (e.g., +term, term^10). Previous work studied how query operators are employed by end-users. In this paper, we study the extent to which using query operators may lead to improved results, regardless of specific users. We hypothesize that the proper use of query operators improves search results. To validate this hypothesis, we present a methodology relying on standard IR test collections. We applied this methodology to TREC-7 and TREC-8 test collections with five IR models implemented in the Terrier search engine. Experiments show that queries enriched with operators give an improvement in effectiveness up to 35.1% over regular queries. This result suggests that end-users would benefit from using operators more often.
geographic information retrieval | 2013
Damien Palacio; Guillaume Cabanac; Gilles Hubert; Karen Pinel-Sauvagnat; Christian Sallaberry
We introduce a framework for searching places according to user interests and spatial context. Our framework combines existing geo-tools or services (e.g., Google Places, Yahoo! BOSS Geo Services, PostGIS, Gisgraphy, Geonames) and ranks results according to features such as distance, popularity, and user preferences. We used this framework to participate in the TREC 2013 Contextual Suggestion Track.
geographic information retrieval | 2013
Damien Palacio; Curdin Derungs; Ross S. Purves
Evaluation of the effectiveness of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) systems is challenging and time consuming. We describe an approach to such evaluations, where we use user generated content in the form of text and associated metadata to build a large test colletion automatically. We can thus show that the UGC test collection is useful for evaluating and exploring some of the critical aspects of a GIR, for instance by submitting large numbers of queries.
agile conference | 2012
Damien Palacio; Christian Sallaberry; Guillaume Cabanac; Gilles Hubert; Mauro Gaio
In an information retrieval (IR) context, users usually issue queries with few terms and no operators (e.g., and, or, +). However, most of users’ information needs involve more expressiveness (e.g., ‘Potato famine in Ireland, but not in Cork’). Our work deals with this category of queries that may be processed by geographic IR (GIR) systems to parse digital libraries according to spatial, temporal, and topical criteria. We propose a GIR framework that supports expressive queries and aggregates results of a multi-criteria search. We also conduct experiments to verify that this approach improves the effectiveness of such search engines (improvement of 27% for topical criteria only, and of 54% for spatial and temporal criteria).
Journal of Spatial Information Science | 2015
Damien Palacio; Curdin Derungs; Ross S. Purves
Geographic information retrieval (GIR) is concerned with returning information in response to an information need, typically expressed in terms of a thematic and spa- tial component linked by a spatial relationship. However, evaluation initiatives have of- ten failed to show significant differences between simple text baselines and more complex spatially enabled GIR approaches. We explore the effectiveness of three systems (a text baseline, spatial query expansion, and a full GIR system utilizing both text and spatial in- dexes) at retrieving documents from a corpus describing mountaineering expeditions, cen- tred around fine grained toponyms. To allow evaluation, we use user generated content (UGC) in the form of metadata associated with individual articles to build a test collec- tion of queries and judgments. The test collection allowed us to demonstrate that a GIR- based method significantly outperformed a text baseline for all but very specific queries associated with very small query radii. We argue that such approaches to test collection development have much to offer in the evaluation of GIR.
Revue des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information - Série Document Numérique | 2011
Guillaume Cabanac; Damien Palacio; Christian Sallaberry; Gilles Hubert
ResumeL’etude des requetes soumises aux moteurs de recherche montre une utilisation croissante des dimensions spatiale et temporelle en complement de la thematique seule. Des travaux proposent d’integrer ces trois dimensions de l’information geographique dans le processus de recherche d’information (RI). Leur qualite n’est actuellement mesuree qu’au travers d’indicateurs lies au stockage et au temps de reponse. Cependant, la pertinence des resultats n’est pas quantifiee. Dans ce contexte, notre proposition est triple. Premierement, nous definissons un cadre d’evaluation de la qualite de tels systemes. Deuxiemement, nous l’exploitons pour tester l’hypothese suivante : la combinaison des trois dimensions ameliore la qualite des resultats. Troisiemement, nous montrons la complementarite de ces dimensions pour le processus de RI.
european conference on research and advanced technology for digital libraries | 2010
Damien Palacio; Guillaume Cabanac; Christian Sallaberry; Gilles Hubert
text retrieval conference | 2013
Gilles Hubert; Guillaume Cabanac; Karen Pinel-Sauvagnat; Damien Palacio; Christian Sallaberry