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Expansion-by-Analogy: A Vector Symbolic Approach to Semantic Search

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Quantum Interaction (QI 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8951))

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Abstract

In this paper, we develop an approach to semantic search that utilizes high-dimensional vector representations to infer the nature of the relationship between query concepts and other concepts in relevant documents. We do so by incorporating outside knowledge drawn from tens of millions of concept-relation-concept triplets, known as semantic predications, extracted from the biomedical literature using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system called SemRep. Inference is accomplished in high-dimensional space using Expansion-by-Analogy, a novel analogical approach to pseudo-relevance feedback, in which the relationships between query concepts and other concepts in documents they occur in guide the query expansion process. The semantic vector based approaches developed in this work show improvements in performance over a baseline bag-of-concepts model, and these improvements are most pronounced on queries that are not conducive to keyword-based search.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by US National Library of Medicine grants R21 LM010826 and R01 LM011563. It was also supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the US National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine. We would like to thank Lance DeVine, for contributing the CHRR implementation that was used in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics at Houston, Houston, USA

    Trevor Cohen

  2. Microsoft Bing, Redmond, WA, USA

    Dominic Widdows

  3. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Thomas Rindflesch

Authors
  1. Trevor Cohen
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  2. Dominic Widdows
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  3. Thomas Rindflesch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Trevor Cohen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Harald Atmanspacher

  2. Universitätsspital Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Claudia Bergomi

  3. University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Thomas Filk

  4. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Kirsty Kitto

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Cohen, T., Widdows, D., Rindflesch, T. (2015). Expansion-by-Analogy: A Vector Symbolic Approach to Semantic Search. In: Atmanspacher, H., Bergomi, C., Filk, T., Kitto, K. (eds) Quantum Interaction. QI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8951. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15931-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15931-7_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15931-7

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