34,771 research outputs found
Soft Seeded SSL Graphs for Unsupervised Semantic Similarity-based Retrieval
Semantic similarity based retrieval is playing an increasingly important role
in many IR systems such as modern web search, question-answering, similar
document retrieval etc. Improvements in retrieval of semantically similar
content are very significant to applications like Quora, Stack Overflow, Siri
etc. We propose a novel unsupervised model for semantic similarity based
content retrieval, where we construct semantic flow graphs for each query, and
introduce the concept of "soft seeding" in graph based semi-supervised learning
(SSL) to convert this into an unsupervised model.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on an equivalent question
retrieval problem on the Stack Exchange QA dataset, where our unsupervised
approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models,
and produces comparable results to the best supervised models. Our research
provides a method to tackle semantic similarity based retrieval without any
training data, and allows seamless extension to different domain QA
communities, as well as to other semantic equivalence tasks.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Information
and Knowledge Management (CIKM '17
CEQE: Contextualized Embeddings for Query Expansion
In this work we leverage recent advances in context-sensitive language models to improve the task of query expansion. Contextualized word representation models, such as ELMo and BERT, are rapidly replacing static embedding models. We propose a new model, Contextualized Embeddings for Query Expansion (CEQE), that utilizes query-focused contextualized embedding vectors. We study the behavior of contextual representations generated for query expansion in ad-hoc document retrieval. We conduct our experiments on probabilistic retrieval models as well as in combination with neural ranking models. We evaluate CEQE on two standard TREC collections: Robust and Deep Learning. We find that CEQE outperforms static embedding-based expansion methods on multiple collections (by up to 18% on Robust and 31% on Deep Learning on average precision) and also improves over proven probabilistic pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) models. We further find that multiple passes of expansion and reranking result in continued gains in effectiveness with CEQE-based approaches outperforming other approaches. The final model incorporating neural and CEQE-based expansion score achieves gains of up to 5% in P@20 and 2% in AP on Robust over the state-of-the-art transformer-based re-ranking model, Birch
Investigating Retrieval Method Selection with Axiomatic Features
We consider algorithm selection in the context of ad-hoc information retrieval. Given a query and a pair of retrieval methods, we propose a meta-learner that predicts how to combine the methods' relevance scores into an overall relevance score. Inspired by neural models' different properties with regard to IR axioms, these predictions are based on features that quantify axiom-related properties of the query and its top ranked documents. We conduct an evaluation on TREC Web Track data and find that the meta-learner often significantly improves over the individual methods. Finally, we conduct feature and query weight analyses to investigate the meta-learner's behavior
An Axiomatic Analysis of Diversity Evaluation Metrics: Introducing the Rank-Biased Utility Metric
Many evaluation metrics have been defined to evaluate the effectiveness
ad-hoc retrieval and search result diversification systems. However, it is
often unclear which evaluation metric should be used to analyze the performance
of retrieval systems given a specific task. Axiomatic analysis is an
informative mechanism to understand the fundamentals of metrics and their
suitability for particular scenarios. In this paper, we define a
constraint-based axiomatic framework to study the suitability of existing
metrics in search result diversification scenarios. The analysis informed the
definition of Rank-Biased Utility (RBU) -- an adaptation of the well-known
Rank-Biased Precision metric -- that takes into account redundancy and the user
effort associated to the inspection of documents in the ranking. Our
experiments over standard diversity evaluation campaigns show that the proposed
metric captures quality criteria reflected by different metrics, being suitable
in the absence of knowledge about particular features of the scenario under
study.Comment: Original version: 10 pages. Preprint of full paper to appear at
SIGIR'18: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research &
Development in Information Retrieval, July 8-12, 2018, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
ACM, New York, NY, US
Personalized content retrieval in context using ontological knowledge
Personalized content retrieval aims at improving the retrieval process by taking into account the particular interests of individual users. However, not all user preferences are relevant in all situations. It is well known that human preferences are complex, multiple, heterogeneous, changing, even contradictory, and should be understood in context with the user goals and tasks at hand. In this paper, we propose a method to build a dynamic representation of the semantic context of ongoing retrieval tasks, which is used to activate different subsets of user interests at runtime, in a way that out-of-context preferences are discarded. Our approach is based on an ontology-driven representation of the domain of discourse, providing enriched descriptions of the semantics involved in retrieval actions and preferences, and enabling the definition of effective means to relate preferences and context
Modeling Temporal Evidence from External Collections
Newsworthy events are broadcast through multiple mediums and prompt the
crowds to produce comments on social media. In this paper, we propose to
leverage on this behavioral dynamics to estimate the most relevant time periods
for an event (i.e., query). Recent advances have shown how to improve the
estimation of the temporal relevance of such topics. In this approach, we build
on two major novelties. First, we mine temporal evidences from hundreds of
external sources into topic-based external collections to improve the
robustness of the detection of relevant time periods. Second, we propose a
formal retrieval model that generalizes the use of the temporal dimension
across different aspects of the retrieval process. In particular, we show that
temporal evidence of external collections can be used to (i) infer a topic's
temporal relevance, (ii) select the query expansion terms, and (iii) re-rank
the final results for improved precision. Experiments with TREC Microblog
collections show that the proposed time-aware retrieval model makes an
effective and extensive use of the temporal dimension to improve search results
over the most recent temporal models. Interestingly, we observe a strong
correlation between precision and the temporal distribution of retrieved and
relevant documents.Comment: To appear in WSDM 201
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