500 research outputs found
Adversarial Sampling and Training for Semi-Supervised Information Retrieval
Ad-hoc retrieval models with implicit feedback often have problems, e.g., the
imbalanced classes in the data set. Too few clicked documents may hurt
generalization ability of the models, whereas too many non-clicked documents
may harm effectiveness of the models and efficiency of training. In addition,
recent neural network-based models are vulnerable to adversarial examples due
to the linear nature in them. To solve the problems at the same time, we
propose an adversarial sampling and training framework to learn ad-hoc
retrieval models with implicit feedback. Our key idea is (i) to augment clicked
examples by adversarial training for better generalization and (ii) to obtain
very informational non-clicked examples by adversarial sampling and training.
Experiments are performed on benchmark data sets for common ad-hoc retrieval
tasks such as Web search, item recommendation, and question answering.
Experimental results indicate that the proposed approaches significantly
outperform strong baselines especially for high-ranked documents, and they
outperform IRGAN in NDCG@5 using only 5% of labeled data for the Web search
task.Comment: Published in WWW 201
Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions
Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and
costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike
traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically,
probabilistic sampling has shown intriguing promise since it enables the design
of estimators that are provably unbiased even when reusing data with missing
judgments. In this paper, we first unify and extend these sampling approaches
by viewing the evaluation problem as a Monte Carlo estimation task that applies
to a large number of common IR metrics. Drawing on the theoretical clarity that
this view offers, we tackle three practical evaluation scenarios: comparing two
systems, comparing systems against a baseline, and ranking systems. For
each scenario, we derive an estimator and a variance-optimizing sampling
distribution while retaining the strengths of sampling-based evaluation,
including unbiasedness, reusability despite missing data, and ease of use in
practice. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we empirically evaluate
our methods against previously used sampling heuristics and find that they
generally cut the number of required relevance judgments at least in half.Comment: Under review; 10 page
Efficient Diversification of Web Search Results
In this paper we analyze the efficiency of various search results
diversification methods. While efficacy of diversification approaches has been
deeply investigated in the past, response time and scalability issues have been
rarely addressed. A unified framework for studying performance and feasibility
of result diversification solutions is thus proposed. First we define a new
methodology for detecting when, and how, query results need to be diversified.
To this purpose, we rely on the concept of "query refinement" to estimate the
probability of a query to be ambiguous. Then, relying on this novel ambiguity
detection method, we deploy and compare on a standard test set, three different
diversification methods: IASelect, xQuAD, and OptSelect. While the first two
are recent state-of-the-art proposals, the latter is an original algorithm
introduced in this paper. We evaluate both the efficiency and the effectiveness
of our approach against its competitors by using the standard TREC Web
diversification track testbed. Results shown that OptSelect is able to run two
orders of magnitude faster than the two other state-of-the-art approaches and
to obtain comparable figures in diversification effectiveness.Comment: VLDB201
NAIS: Neural Attentive Item Similarity Model for Recommendation
Item-to-item collaborative filtering (aka. item-based CF) has been long used
for building recommender systems in industrial settings, owing to its
interpretability and efficiency in real-time personalization. It builds a
user's profile as her historically interacted items, recommending new items
that are similar to the user's profile. As such, the key to an item-based CF
method is in the estimation of item similarities. Early approaches use
statistical measures such as cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to
estimate item similarities, which are less accurate since they lack tailored
optimization for the recommendation task. In recent years, several works
attempt to learn item similarities from data, by expressing the similarity as
an underlying model and estimating model parameters by optimizing a
recommendation-aware objective function. While extensive efforts have been made
to use shallow linear models for learning item similarities, there has been
relatively less work exploring nonlinear neural network models for item-based
CF.
In this work, we propose a neural network model named Neural Attentive Item
Similarity model (NAIS) for item-based CF. The key to our design of NAIS is an
attention network, which is capable of distinguishing which historical items in
a user profile are more important for a prediction. Compared to the
state-of-the-art item-based CF method Factored Item Similarity Model (FISM),
our NAIS has stronger representation power with only a few additional
parameters brought by the attention network. Extensive experiments on two
public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of NAIS. This work is the first
attempt that designs neural network models for item-based CF, opening up new
research possibilities for future developments of neural recommender systems
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