Ranking Archived Documents for Structured Queries on Semantic Layers

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of ranking archived documents retrieved via structured semantic queries by proposing models that consider relevance, timeliness, and entity relations, improving retrieval effectiveness.

Contribution

It formalizes the task of ranking documents for structured semantic queries and introduces two models that incorporate relevance, timeliness, and entity relations.

Findings

Proposed ranking models outperform baseline methods.

Models effectively incorporate temporal and semantic information.

Experimental results highlight model limitations and areas for improvement.

Abstract

Archived collections of documents (like newspaper and web archives) serve as important information sources in a variety of disciplines, including Digital Humanities, Historical Science, and Journalism. However, the absence of efficient and meaningful exploration methods still remains a major hurdle in the way of turning them into usable sources of information. A semantic layer is an RDF graph that describes metadata and semantic information about a collection of archived documents, which in turn can be queried through a semantic query language (SPARQL). This allows running advanced queries by combining metadata of the documents (like publication date) and content-based semantic information (like entities mentioned in the documents). However, the results returned by such structured queries can be numerous and moreover they all equally match the query. In this paper, we deal with this problem and formalize the task of "ranking archived documents for structured queries on semantic layers". Then, we propose two ranking models for the problem at hand which jointly consider: i) the relativeness of documents to entities, ii) the timeliness of documents, and iii) the temporal relations among the entities. The experimental results on a new evaluation dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed models and allow us to understand their limitations