Many machine learning, data mining and statistical analysis tasks are used to identify properties of data, or to build models of sampled data. Unfortunately, these analytical methods are computationally expensive; their computational resource use being a function of the dimensionality and sample count of the data being analysed. Recent advances is data acquisition (such as genetic sequencing) have allowed us to capture very large amounts of data (of the order of terabytes) for analysis and modelling. The complexity of current machine learning and data mining methods makes them infeasible to be directly applied to such large scale data.

Text based information retrieval systems retrieve documents based on the set of key terms provided to them. The documents returned are ranked according to the count of each query term, therefore if the query terms do not exist in the document it is not found. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a method of computing hidden topics within documents using linear algebra. By obtaining the relationships between each hidden topic and each term, we are able to compute which terms are similar by comparing the similarity of each of the terms topics. This hidden topic information allows the retrieval system to return documents that do not contain the query terms, but do contain terms that are similar to the query terms (shown in Fig. 5). The current linear algebraic techniques use the Euclidean distance as a similarity measure for vectors. Unfortunately, the Euclidean distance is not a useful metric for term or document similarity.

Text based information retrieval systems are built using document models. To analyse the retrieval precision of a model, a set of queries are provided to the model and the results are compared to the desired results. This type of analysis allows us to compare the precision of different retrieval models, but it does not provide us with any feedback on where the models could be improved. Currently there are no methods of analysis of text retrieval systems that are able to show where deficiencies lie within the document model. We aim to investigate methods of retrieval analysis that is able to reveal where specific document model deficiencies occur, using a given query and document set. Our analysis will allow information retrieval experiments to be more thorough and show why certain document models achieve a certain precision, thus allowing the document models to be adjusted and improved.

Language models for text based information retrieval have become a de facto standard due to their simplicity and effectiveness. Recently, several language modelling techniques have been developed that assume a hidden distribution of topics within the set of documents. Such methods include Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), where the former uses a multinomial distribution of topics, while the latter uses a Dirichlet prior. By using this notion of hidden topics, we are able to compute relationships from term to topic and hence term to term. Unfortunately, these language modelling methods produces large amounts of data and require lengthy periods of time to perform document retrieval.

The World Wide Web is the most important information source in modern society. The information within the Web is accessed through Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines use a global popularity rank during the computation of their results, based on links from all of the pages on the Web. This global popularity rank used by Google is known as PageRank. Using these global popularity ranks biases the search results towards the globally popular Web pages. Our aim is to investigate the effect of a peer popularity rank where popularity is measured only through sites of a similar nature. We perform this task by observing the interaction between Web pages at a finer resolution (as shown in Fig. 1). We expect that using the peer popularity rank will allow search engines to locate Web pages that are more specific to the user needs rather than pages of general popularity. This will improve the quality of information that is delivered by Web search engines and provide organisation amongst the billions of existing Web pages.

Document models are used for information retrieval in order to compute the probability of a query being related to the document. The majority of document models are functions of the terms that appear within the document. This implies that a query is only relevant to a document if the query terms exist within the document, which is far from the truth.

In our project, we have created a new form of document model called, a Relevance-based document model, which is built based on the relevance of each query to the document and not the words that appear within the document. Relevance-based document models are constructed using a set of queries and the associated relevance of the query to the document (shown in Fig. 6). This information allows us to construct a model that provides 100% precision results for the known queries and large improvements in precision over document content-based models for partially known queries. Since the relevance-based document models are based only on the query terms and their relevance to a document, the time required to build the models is very fast and the storage required to store the model is very compact.

Web searching should be as simple as providing the search engine with a query and having the search engine return a link to the desired Web page. Unfortunately, current Web search engines use text based queries and therefore require the user to provide keywords. Converting the users information need into a few key words is not a simple process. Due to this, Web search patterns involve the user visiting many Web pages that do not satisfy their information need, while interleaving this process with several visits to the Web search engine. Rather than the user actively searching for pages using key words, the search engine could provide pages to the user based on their Web usage patterns. By examining the users Web history, we will be able to compute the types of Web pages the user desires and hence provide search results to the user without the need for key words. This method of passive Web searching is called prefetching. Given that Google has had such success in using link analysis to provide useful retrieval results, we aim to investigate the utility of Web links to perform prefetching.