17,589 research outputs found
Neural Networks for Information Retrieval
Machine learning plays a role in many aspects of modern IR systems, and deep
learning is applied in all of them. The fast pace of modern-day research has
given rise to many different approaches for many different IR problems. The
amount of information available can be overwhelming both for junior students
and for experienced researchers looking for new research topics and directions.
Additionally, it is interesting to see what key insights into IR problems the
new technologies are able to give us. The aim of this full-day tutorial is to
give a clear overview of current tried-and-trusted neural methods in IR and how
they benefit IR research. It covers key architectures, as well as the most
promising future directions.Comment: Overview of full-day tutorial at SIGIR 201
Unsupervised, Efficient and Semantic Expertise Retrieval
We introduce an unsupervised discriminative model for the task of retrieving
experts in online document collections. We exclusively employ textual evidence
and avoid explicit feature engineering by learning distributed word
representations in an unsupervised way. We compare our model to
state-of-the-art unsupervised statistical vector space and probabilistic
generative approaches. Our proposed log-linear model achieves the retrieval
performance levels of state-of-the-art document-centric methods with the low
inference cost of so-called profile-centric approaches. It yields a
statistically significant improved ranking over vector space and generative
models in most cases, matching the performance of supervised methods on various
benchmarks. That is, by using solely text we can do as well as methods that
work with external evidence and/or relevance feedback. A contrastive analysis
of rankings produced by discriminative and generative approaches shows that
they have complementary strengths due to the ability of the unsupervised
discriminative model to perform semantic matching.Comment: WWW2016, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World
Wide Web. 201
Graph-Sparse LDA: A Topic Model with Structured Sparsity
Originally designed to model text, topic modeling has become a powerful tool
for uncovering latent structure in domains including medicine, finance, and
vision. The goals for the model vary depending on the application: in some
cases, the discovered topics may be used for prediction or some other
downstream task. In other cases, the content of the topic itself may be of
intrinsic scientific interest.
Unfortunately, even using modern sparse techniques, the discovered topics are
often difficult to interpret due to the high dimensionality of the underlying
space. To improve topic interpretability, we introduce Graph-Sparse LDA, a
hierarchical topic model that leverages knowledge of relationships between
words (e.g., as encoded by an ontology). In our model, topics are summarized by
a few latent concept-words from the underlying graph that explain the observed
words. Graph-Sparse LDA recovers sparse, interpretable summaries on two
real-world biomedical datasets while matching state-of-the-art prediction
performance
Variational Deep Semantic Hashing for Text Documents
As the amount of textual data has been rapidly increasing over the past
decade, efficient similarity search methods have become a crucial component of
large-scale information retrieval systems. A popular strategy is to represent
original data samples by compact binary codes through hashing. A spectrum of
machine learning methods have been utilized, but they often lack expressiveness
and flexibility in modeling to learn effective representations. The recent
advances of deep learning in a wide range of applications has demonstrated its
capability to learn robust and powerful feature representations for complex
data. Especially, deep generative models naturally combine the expressiveness
of probabilistic generative models with the high capacity of deep neural
networks, which is very suitable for text modeling. However, little work has
leveraged the recent progress in deep learning for text hashing.
In this paper, we propose a series of novel deep document generative models
for text hashing. The first proposed model is unsupervised while the second one
is supervised by utilizing document labels/tags for hashing. The third model
further considers document-specific factors that affect the generation of
words. The probabilistic generative formulation of the proposed models provides
a principled framework for model extension, uncertainty estimation, simulation,
and interpretability. Based on variational inference and reparameterization,
the proposed models can be interpreted as encoder-decoder deep neural networks
and thus they are capable of learning complex nonlinear distributed
representations of the original documents. We conduct a comprehensive set of
experiments on four public testbeds. The experimental results have demonstrated
the effectiveness of the proposed supervised learning models for text hashing.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Building simulated queries for known-item topics: an analysis using six european languages
There has been increased interest in the use of simulated queries for evaluation and estimation purposes in Information Retrieval. However, there are still many unaddressed issues regarding their usage and impact on evaluation because their quality, in terms of retrieval performance, is unlike real queries. In this paper, we focus on methods for building simulated known-item topics and explore their quality against real known-item topics. Using existing generation models as our starting point, we explore factors which may influence the generation of the known-item topic. Informed by this detailed analysis (on six European languages) we propose a model with improved document and term selection properties, showing that simulated known-item topics can be generated that are comparable to real known-item topics. This is a significant step towards validating the potential usefulness of simulated queries: for evaluation purposes, and because building models of querying behavior provides a deeper insight into the querying process so that better retrieval mechanisms can be developed to support the user
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