Analysis of Evolutionary Behavior in Self-Learning Media Search Engines

Abstract

The diversity of intrinsic qualities of multimedia entities tends to impede their effective retrieval. In a Self-Learning Search Engine architecture, the subtle nuances of human perceptions and deep knowledge are taught and captured through unsupervised reinforcement learning, where the degree of reinforcement may be suitably calibrated. Such architectural paradigm enables indexes to evolve naturally while accommodating the dynamic changes of user interests. It operates by continuously constructing indexes over time, while injecting progressive improvement in search performance. For search operations to be effective, convergence of index learning is of crucial importance to ensure efficiency and robustness. In this paper, we develop a Self-Learning Search Engine architecture based on reinforcement learning using a Markov Decision Process framework. The balance between exploration and exploitation is achieved through evolutionary exploration Strategies. The evolutionary index learning behavior is then studied and formulated using stochastic analysis. Experimental results are presented which corroborate the steady convergence of the index evolution mechanism.