AMC: Attention guided Multi-modal Correlation Learning for Image Search

Given a user's query, traditional image search systems rank images according to its relevance to a single modality (e.g., image content or surrounding text). Nowadays, an increasing number of images on the Internet are available with associated meta data in rich modalities (e.g., titles, keywords, tags, etc.), which can be exploited for better similarity measure with queries. In this paper, we leverage visual and textual modalities for image search by learning their correlation with input query. According to the intent of query, attention mechanism can be introduced to adaptively balance the importance of different modalities. We propose a novel Attention guided Multi-modal Correlation (AMC) learning method which consists of a jointly learned hierarchy of intra and inter-attention networks. Conditioned on query's intent, intra-attention networks (i.e., visual intra-attention network and language intra-attention network) attend on informative parts within each modality; a multi-modal inter-attention network promotes the importance of the most query-relevant modalities. In experiments, we evaluate AMC models on the search logs from two real world image search engines and show a significant boost on the ranking of user-clicked images in search results. Additionally, we extend AMC models to caption ranking task on COCO dataset and achieve competitive results compared with recent state-of-the-arts.Comment: CVPR 201

Next Generation of Product Search and Discovery

Online shopping has become an important part of people’s daily life with the rapid development of e-commerce. In some domains such as books, electronics, and CD/DVDs, online shopping has surpassed or even replaced the traditional shopping method. Compared with traditional retailing, e-commerce is information intensive. One of the key factors to succeed in e-business is how to facilitate the consumers’ approaches to discover a product. Conventionally a product search engine based on a keyword search or category browser is provided to help users find the product information they need. The general goal of a product search system is to enable users to quickly locate information of interest and to minimize users’ efforts in search and navigation. In this process human factors play a significant role. Finding product information could be a tricky task and may require an intelligent use of search engines, and a non-trivial navigation of multilayer categories. Searching for useful product information can be frustrating for many users, especially those inexperienced users. This dissertation focuses on developing a new visual product search system that effectively extracts the properties of unstructured products, and presents the possible items of attraction to users so that the users can quickly locate the ones they would be most likely interested in. We designed and developed a feature extraction algorithm that retains product color and local pattern features, and the experimental evaluation on the benchmark dataset demonstrated that it is robust against common geometric and photometric visual distortions. Besides, instead of ignoring product text information, we investigated and developed a ranking model learned via a unified probabilistic hypergraph that is capable of capturing correlations among product visual content and textual content. Moreover, we proposed and designed a fuzzy hierarchical co-clustering algorithm for the collaborative filtering product recommendation. Via this method, users can be automatically grouped into different interest communities based on their behaviors. Then, a customized recommendation can be performed according to these implicitly detected relations. In summary, the developed search system performs much better in a visual unstructured product search when compared with state-of-art approaches. With the comprehensive ranking scheme and the collaborative filtering recommendation module, the user’s overhead in locating the information of value is reduced, and the user’s experience of seeking for useful product information is optimized

Learning Relatedness Measures for Entity Linking

Entity Linking is the task of detecting, in text documents, relevant mentions to entities of a given knowledge base. To this end, entity-linking algorithms use several signals and features extracted from the input text or from the knowl- edge base. The most important of such features is entity relatedness. Indeed, we argue that these algorithms benefit from maximizing the relatedness among the relevant enti- ties selected for annotation, since this minimizes errors in disambiguating entity-linking. The definition of an e↵ective relatedness function is thus a crucial point in any entity-linking algorithm. In this paper we address the problem of learning high-quality entity relatedness functions. First, we formalize the problem of learning entity relatedness as a learning-to-rank problem. We propose a methodology to create reference datasets on the basis of manually annotated data. Finally, we show that our machine-learned entity relatedness function performs better than other relatedness functions previously proposed, and, more importantly, improves the overall performance of dif- ferent state-of-the-art entity-linking algorithms

Enhanced web-based summary generation for search.

After a user types in a search query on a major search engine, they are presented with a number of search results. Each search result is made up of a title, brief text summary and a URL. It is then the user\u27s job to select documents for further review. Our research aims to improve the accuracy of users selecting relevant documents by improving the way these web pages are summarized. Improvements in accuracy will lead to time improvements and user experience improvements. We propose ReClose, a system for generating web document summaries. ReClose generates summary content through combining summarization techniques from query-biased and query-independent summary generation. Query-biased summaries generally provide query terms in context. Query-independent summaries focus on summarizing documents as a whole. Combining these summary techniques led to a 10% improvement in user decision making over Google generated summaries. Color-coded ReClose summaries provide keyword usage depth at a glance and also alert users to topic departures. Color-coding further enhanced ReClose results and led to a 20% improvement in user decision making over Google generated summaries. Many online documents include structure and multimedia of various forms such as tables, lists, forms and images. We propose to include this structure in web page summaries. We found that the expert user was insignificantly slowed in decision making while the majority of average users made decisions more quickly using summaries including structure without any decrease in decision accuracy. We additionally extended ReClose for use in summarizing large numbers of tweets in tracking flu outbreaks in social media. The resulting summaries have variable length and are effective at summarizing flu related trends. Users of the system obtained an accuracy of 0.86 labeling multi-tweet summaries. This showed that the basis of ReClose is effective outside of web documents and that variable length summaries can be more effective than fixed length. Overall the ReClose system provides unique summaries that contain more informative content than current search engines produce, highlight the results in a more meaningful way, and add structure when meaningful. The applications of ReClose extend far beyond search and have been demonstrated in summarizing pools of tweets

Tree-based Text-Vision BERT for Video Search in Baidu Video Advertising

The advancement of the communication technology and the popularity of the smart phones foster the booming of video ads. Baidu, as one of the leading search engine companies in the world, receives billions of search queries per day. How to pair the video ads with the user search is the core task of Baidu video advertising. Due to the modality gap, the query-to-video retrieval is much more challenging than traditional query-to-document retrieval and image-to-image search. Traditionally, the query-to-video retrieval is tackled by the query-to-title retrieval, which is not reliable when the quality of tiles are not high. With the rapid progress achieved in computer vision and natural language processing in recent years, content-based search methods becomes promising for the query-to-video retrieval. Benefited from pretraining on large-scale datasets, some visionBERT methods based on cross-modal attention have achieved excellent performance in many vision-language tasks not only in academia but also in industry. Nevertheless, the expensive computation cost of cross-modal attention makes it impractical for large-scale search in industrial applications. In this work, we present a tree-based combo-attention network (TCAN) which has been recently launched in Baidu's dynamic video advertising platform. It provides a practical solution to deploy the heavy cross-modal attention for the large-scale query-to-video search. After launching tree-based combo-attention network, click-through rate gets improved by 2.29\% and conversion rate get improved by 2.63\%.Comment: This revision is based on a manuscript submitted in October 2020, to ICDE 2021. We thank the Program Committee for their valuable comment