1,437 research outputs found
Using Learning to Rank Approach to Promoting Diversity for Biomedical Information Retrieval with Wikipedia
In most of the traditional information retrieval (IR) models, the independent
relevance assumption is taken, which assumes the relevance of a document is
independent of other documents. However, the pitfall of this is the high redundancy
and low diversity of retrieval result. This has been seen in many scenarios, especially
in biomedical IR, where the information need of one query may refer to different
aspects. Promoting diversity in IR takes the relationship between documents into
account. Unlike previous studies, we tackle this problem in the learning to rank
perspective. The main challenges are how to find salient features for biomedical data
and how to integrate dynamic features into the ranking model. To address these
challenges, Wikipedia is used to detect topics of documents for generating diversity
biased features. A combined model is proposed and studied to learn a diversified
ranking result. Experiment results show the proposed method outperforms baseline
models
Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR)
systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily
lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering,
and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its
origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models.
While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and
semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face
challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of
contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution
requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse
retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as
language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the
emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has
revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language
understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities.
Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR
systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary
to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a
comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs
and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers,
rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within
this expanding field
Recommendation Systems: An Insight Into Current Development and Future Research Challenges
Research on recommendation systems is swiftly producing an abundance of novel methods, constantly challenging the current state-of-the-art. Inspired by advancements in many related fields, like Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, many hybrid approaches based on deep learning are being proposed, making solid improvements over traditional methods. On the downside, this flurry of research activity, often focused on improving over a small number of baselines, makes it hard to identify reference methods and standardized evaluation protocols. Furthermore, the traditional categorization of recommendation systems into content-based, collaborative filtering and hybrid systems lacks the informativeness it once had. With this work, we provide a gentle introduction to recommendation systems, describing the task they are designed to solve and the challenges faced in research. Building on previous work, an extension to the standard taxonomy is presented, to better reflect the latest research trends, including the diverse use of content and temporal information. To ease the approach toward the technical methodologies recently proposed in this field, we review several representative methods selected primarily from top conferences and systematically describe their goals and novelty. We formalize the main evaluation metrics adopted by researchers and identify the most commonly used benchmarks. Lastly, we discuss issues in current research practices by analyzing experimental results reported on three popular datasets
Evolution of statistical analysis in empirical software engineering research: Current state and steps forward
Software engineering research is evolving and papers are increasingly based
on empirical data from a multitude of sources, using statistical tests to
determine if and to what degree empirical evidence supports their hypotheses.
To investigate the practices and trends of statistical analysis in empirical
software engineering (ESE), this paper presents a review of a large pool of
papers from top-ranked software engineering journals. First, we manually
reviewed 161 papers and in the second phase of our method, we conducted a more
extensive semi-automatic classification of papers spanning the years 2001--2015
and 5,196 papers. Results from both review steps was used to: i) identify and
analyze the predominant practices in ESE (e.g., using t-test or ANOVA), as well
as relevant trends in usage of specific statistical methods (e.g.,
nonparametric tests and effect size measures) and, ii) develop a conceptual
model for a statistical analysis workflow with suggestions on how to apply
different statistical methods as well as guidelines to avoid pitfalls. Lastly,
we confirm existing claims that current ESE practices lack a standard to report
practical significance of results. We illustrate how practical significance can
be discussed in terms of both the statistical analysis and in the
practitioner's context.Comment: journal submission, 34 pages, 8 figure
Dense Text Retrieval based on Pretrained Language Models: A Survey
Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking,
where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's
queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based
ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually
evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective
retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and
model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models
(PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approaches by
leveraging the excellent modeling capacity of PLMs. With powerful PLMs, we can
effectively learn the representations of queries and texts in the latent
representation space, and further construct the semantic matching function
between the dense vectors for relevance modeling. Such a retrieval approach is
referred to as dense retrieval, since it employs dense vectors (a.k.a.,
embeddings) to represent the texts. Considering the rapid progress on dense
retrieval, in this survey, we systematically review the recent advances on
PLM-based dense retrieval. Different from previous surveys on dense retrieval,
we take a new perspective to organize the related work by four major aspects,
including architecture, training, indexing and integration, and summarize the
mainstream techniques for each aspect. We thoroughly survey the literature, and
include 300+ related reference papers on dense retrieval. To support our
survey, we create a website for providing useful resources, and release a code
repertory and toolkit for implementing dense retrieval models. This survey aims
to provide a comprehensive, practical reference focused on the major progress
for dense text retrieval
Rapid Mission Assurance Assessment via Sociotechnical Modeling and Simulation
How do organizations rapidly assess command-level effects of cyber attacks? Leaders need a way of assuring themselves that their organization, people, and information technology can continue their missions in a contested cyber environment. To do this, leaders should: 1) require assessments be more than analogical, anecdotal or simplistic snapshots in time; 2) demand the ability to rapidly model their organizations; 3) identify their organization’s structural vulnerabilities; and 4) have the ability to forecast mission assurance scenarios. Using text mining to build agent based dynamic network models of information processing organizations, I examine impacts of contested cyber environments on three common focus areas of information assurance—confidentiality, integrity, and availability. I find that assessing impacts of cyber attacks is a nuanced affair dependent on the nature of the attack, the nature of the organization and its missions, and the nature of the measurements. For well-manned information processing organizations, many attacks are in the nuisance range and that only multipronged or severe attacks cause meaningful failure. I also find that such organizations can design for resiliency and provide guidelines in how to do so
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