A faceted approach to reachability analysis of graph modelled collections

Nowadays, there is a proliferation of available information sources from different modalities—text, images, audio, video and more. Information objects are not isolated anymore. They are frequently connected via metadata, semantic links, etc. This leads to various challenges in graph-based information retrieval. This paper is concerned with the reachability analysis of multimodal graph modelled collections. We use our framework to leverage the combination of features of different modalities through our formulation of faceted search. This study highlights the effect of different facets and link types in improving reachability of relevant information objects. The experiments are performed on the Image CLEF 2011 Wikipedia collection with about 400,000 documents and images. The results demonstrate that the combination of different facets is conductive to obtain higher reachability. We obtain 373% recall gain for very hard topics by using our graph model of the collection. Further, by adding semantic links to the collection, we gain a 10% increase in the overall recall.