Toan Luu

Scalable Peer-to-Peer Web Retrieval with Highly Discriminative Keys

The suitability of peer-to-peer (P2P) approaches for full-text Web retrieval has recently been questioned because of the claimed unacceptable bandwidth consumption induced by retrieval from very large document collections. In this contribution we formalize a novel indexing/retrieval model that achieves high performance, cost-efficient retrieval by indexing with highly discriminative keys (HDKs) stored in a distributed global index maintained in a structured P2P network. HDKs correspond to carefully selected terms and term sets appearing in a small number of collection documents. We provide a theoretical analysis of the scalability of our retrieval model and report experimental results obtained with our HDK-based P2P retrieval engine. These results show that, despite increased indexing costs, the total traffic generated with the HDK approach is significantly smaller than the one obtained with distributed single-term indexing strategies. Furthermore, our experiments show that the retrieval performance obtained with a random set of real queries is comparable to the one of centralized, single-term solution using the best state-of-the-art BM25 relevance computation scheme. Finally, our scalability analysis demonstrates that the HDK approach can scale to large networks of peers indexing Web-size document collections, thus opening the way towards viable, truly-decentralized Web retrieval.

Web text retrieval with a P2P query-driven index

In this paper, we present a query-driven indexing/retrieval strategy for efficient full text retrieval from large document collections distributed within a structured P2P network. Our indexing strategy is based on two important properties: (1) the generated distributed index stores posting lists for carefully chosen indexing term combinations, and (2) the posting lists containing too many document references are truncated to a bounded number of their top-ranked elements. These two properties guarantee acceptable storage and bandwidth requirements, essentially because the number of indexing term combinations remains scalable and the transmitted posting lists never exceed a constant size. However, as the number of generated term combinations can still become quite large, we also use term statistics extracted from available query logs to index only such combinations that are frequently present in user queries. Thus, by avoiding the generation of superfluous indexing term combinations, we achieve an additional substantial reduction in bandwidth and storage consumption. As a result, the generated distributed index corresponds to a constantly evolving query-driven indexing structure that efficiently follows current information needs of the users. More precisely, our theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate that, at the price of a marginal loss in retrieval quality for rare queries, the generated index size and network traffic remain manageable even for web-size document collections. Furthermore, our experiments show that at the same time the achieved retrieval quality is fully comparable to the one obtained with a state-of-the-art centralized query engine.

ALVIS peers: a scalable full-text peer-to-peer retrieval engine

We present Alvis peers, a full-text P2P retrieval engine designed to offer retrieval performance comparable to centralized solutions while scaling to a very large number of peers. It is the result of our research efforts within the project Alvis1 European FP 6 STREP project ALVIS, http://www.alvis.info/ that aims at building a truly-distributed semantic search engine. To cope with problem of unscalable bandwidth consumption in the P2P network, the engine implements a novel retrieval model that indexes highly-discriminative keys (HDKs)---terms and term sets appearing in a limited number of collection documents. Our prototype is a fully-functional retrieval engine built over a structured P2P network. It includes a component for HDK based indexing and retrieval, and a distributed content-based ranking module. Such an integrated system represents a substantial contribution to the design and development of realistic P2P retrieval systems.

Query-driven indexing for scalable peer-to-peer text retrieval

We present a query-driven algorithm for the distributed indexing of large document collections within structured P2P networks. To cope with bandwidth consumption that has been identified as the major problem for the standard P2P approach with single term indexing, we leverage a distributed index that stores up to top-k document references only for carefully chosen indexing term combinations. In addition, since the number of possible term combinations extracted from a document collection can be very large, we propose to use query statistics to index only such combinations that are indeed frequently requested by the users. Thus, by avoiding the maintenance of superfluous indexing information, we achieve a substantial reduction in bandwidth and storage. A specific activation mechanism is applied to continuously update the indexing information according to changes in the query distribution, resulting in an efficient, constantly evolving query-driven indexing structure. We show that the size of the index and the generated indexing/retrieval traffic remains manageable even for web-size document collections at the price of a marginal loss in precision for rare queries. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results provide convincing evidence about the feasibility of the query-driven indexing strategy for large scale P2P text retrieval. Moreover, our experiments confirm that the retrieval performance is only slightly lower than the one obtained with state-of-the-art centralized query engines.

AlvisP2P: scalable peer-to-peer text retrieval in a structured P2P network

In this paper we present the AlvisP2P IR engine, which enables efficient retrieval with multi-keyword queries from a global document collection available in a P2P network. In such a network, each peer publishes its local index and invests a part of its local computing resources (storage, CPU, bandwidth) to maintain a fraction of a global P2P index. This investment is rewarded by the network-wide accessibility of the local documents via the global search facility. The AlvisP2P engine uses an optimized overlay network and relies on novel indexing/retrieval mechanisms that ensure low bandwidth consumption, thus enabling unlimited network growth. Our demonstration shows how an easy-to-install AlvisP2P client can be used to join an existing P2P network, index local (text or even multimedia) documents with collection-specific indexing mechanisms, and control access rights to them.

A peer-to-peer architecture for information retrieval across digital library collections

Peer-to-peer networks have been identified as promising architectural concept for developing search scenarios across digital library collections. Digital libraries typically offer sophisticated search over their local content, however, search methods involving a network of such stand-alone components are currently quite limited. We present an architecture for highly-efficient search over digital library collections based on structured P2P networks. As the standard single-term indexing strategy faces significant scalability limitations in distributed environments, we propose a novel indexing strategy–key-based indexing. The keys are term sets that appear in a restricted number of collection documents. Thus, they are discriminative with respect to the global document collection, and ensure scalable search costs. Moreover, key-based indexing computes posting list joins during indexing time, which significantly improves query performance. As search efficient solutions usually imply costly indexing procedures, we present experimental results that show acceptable indexing costs while the retrieval performance is comparable to the standard centralized solutions with TF-IDF ranking.

Query-driven indexing for peer-to-peer text retrieval

We describe a query-driven indexing framework for scalable text retrieval over structured P2P networks. To cope with the bandwidth consumption problem that has been identified as the major obstacle for full-text retrieval in P2P networks, we truncate posting lists associated with indexing features to a constant size storing only top-k ranked document references. To compensate for the loss of information caused by the truncation, we extend the set of indexing features with carefully chosen term sets. Indexing term sets are selected based on the query statistics extracted from query logs, thus we index only such combinations that are a) frequently present in user queries and b) non-redundant w.r.t the rest of the index. The distributed index is compact and efficient as it constantly evolves adapting to the current query popularity distribution. Moreover, it is possible to control the tradeoff between the storage/bandwidth requirements and the quality of query answering by tuning the indexing parameters. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate that we can indeed achieve scalable P2P text retrieval for very large document collections and deliver good retrieval performance.

Collaborative ranking and profiling: exploiting the wisdom of crowds in tailored web search

Popular search engines essentially rely on information about the structure of the graph of linked elements to find the most relevant results for a given query. While this approach is satisfactory for popular interest domains or when the user expectations follow the main trend, it is very sensitive to the case of ambiguous queries, where queries can have answers over several different domains. Elements pertaining to an implicitly targeted interest domain with low popularity are usually ranked lower than expected by the user. This is a consequence of the poor usage of user-centric information in search engines. Leveraging semantic information can help avoid such situations by proposing complementary results that are carefully tailored to match user interests. This paper proposes a collaborative search companion system, CoFeed, that collects user search queries and accesses feedback to build user- and document-centric profiling information. Over time, the system constructs ranked collections of elements that maintain the required information diversity and enhance the user search experience by presenting additional results tailored to the user interest space. This collaborative search companion requires a supporting architecture adapted to large user populations generating high request loads. To that end, it integrates mechanisms for ensuring scalability and load balancing of the service under varying loads and user interest distributions. Experiments with a deployed prototype highlight the efficiency of the system by analyzing improvement in search relevance, computational cost, scalability and load balance.

CoFeed: privacy-preserving Web search recommendation based on collaborative aggregation of interest feedback

Search engines essentially rely on the structure of the graph of hyperlinks. Although accurate for the main trend, this is not effective when some query is ambiguous. Leveraging semantic information by the mean of interest matching allows proposing complementary results that are tailored to the users expectations. This paper proposes a collaborative search companion system, CoFeed, that collects user search queries and that considers feedback to build user‐centric and document‐centric profiling information. Over time, the system constructs ranked collections of elements that maintain the required information diversity and enhance the user search experience by presenting additional results tailored to the users interest space. This collaborative search companion requires a supporting architecture adapted to large user populations generating high request loads. To that end, it integrates mechanisms for ensuring scalability and load balancing of the service under varying loads and user interest distributions. Moreover, collecting the recommendation data poses the problem of users’ privacy, and the bias one peer can induce to the system by sending fake recommendations. To that end, CoFeed ensures both publisher anonymity and rate limitation. With the former, the origin of the data is never known by the server that processes it, even if several servers collude to spy on some user. The latter, combined with decoupled authentication, allows to minimize the influence of cheating peers sending fake recommendations. Experiments with a deployed prototype highlight the efficiency of the system by analyzing improvement in search relevance, computational cost, scalability and load balancing. Copyright

Managing collaborative feedback information for distributed retrieval

Despite the many research efforts invested recently in peer-to-peer search engines, none of the proposed system has reached the level of quality and efficiency of their centralized counterpart. One of the main reasons for this inferior performance is the difficulty to attract a critical mass of users that would make the peer-to-peer system truly competitive. We argue that decentralized search mechanisms should not aim at replacing existing engines, but instead complement them by adding novel functionalities that would be difficult to provide in a centralized manner. This paper introduces an example of such a complementary search mechanism and presents the design of a distributed collaborative system for leveraging user feedback and document/user profiling information.