NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is commonly used to boost the performance of traditional information retrieval (IR) models by using top-ranked documents to identify and weight new query terms, thereby reducing the effect of query-document vocabulary mismatches. While neural retrieval models have recently demonstrated strong results for ad-hoc retrieval, combining them with PRF is not straightforward due to incompatibilities between existing PRF approaches and neural architectures. To bridge this gap, we propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks. Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed NPRF framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models.Comment: Full paper in EMNLP 201

Investment-Based Underperformance Following Seasoned Equity Offerings

Adding a return factor based on capital investment into standard, calendar-time factor regressions makes underperformance following seasoned equity offerings largely insignificant and reduces its magnitude by 37-46%. The reason is that issuers invest more than nonissuers matched on size and book-to-market. Moreover, the low-minus-high investment-to-asset factor earns a significant average return of 0.37% per month. Our evidence suggests that the underperformance results from the negative investment-expected return relation, as predicted by Carlson, Fisher, and Giammarino (2005).

NLO corrections to WWZ and ZZZ production at the ILC

We calculate the full one-loop electroweak corrections to tri-boson production (ZZZ and WWZ) at the ILC. This is important to understand the Standard Model (SM) gauge quartic couplings which can be a window on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that even after subtracting the leading QED corrections, the electroweak corrections can still be large especially as the energy increases.Comment: 7 pages, proceedings of the 3rd CPP Workshop, September 23-25, 2010, KEK Tsukuba Japa

Magneto-Optical Stern-Gerlach Effect in Atomic Ensemble

We study the birefringence of the quantized polarized light in a magneto-optically manipulated atomic ensemble as a generalized Stern-Gerlach Effect of light. To explain this engineered birefringence microscopically, we derive an effective Shr\"odinger equation for the spatial motion of two orthogonally polarized components, which behave as a spin with an effective magnetic moment leading to a Stern-Gerlach split in an nonuniform magnetic field. We show that electromagnetic induced transparency (EIT) mechanism can enhance the magneto-optical Stern-Gerlach effect of light in the presence of a control field with a transverse spatial profile and a inhomogeneous magnetic field.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure