68,290 research outputs found
Training Curricula for Open Domain Answer Re-Ranking
In precision-oriented tasks like answer ranking, it is more important to rank
many relevant answers highly than to retrieve all relevant answers. It follows
that a good ranking strategy would be to learn how to identify the easiest
correct answers first (i.e., assign a high ranking score to answers that have
characteristics that usually indicate relevance, and a low ranking score to
those with characteristics that do not), before incorporating more complex
logic to handle difficult cases (e.g., semantic matching or reasoning). In this
work, we apply this idea to the training of neural answer rankers using
curriculum learning. We propose several heuristics to estimate the difficulty
of a given training sample. We show that the proposed heuristics can be used to
build a training curriculum that down-weights difficult samples early in the
training process. As the training process progresses, our approach gradually
shifts to weighting all samples equally, regardless of difficulty. We present a
comprehensive evaluation of our proposed idea on three answer ranking datasets.
Results show that our approach leads to superior performance of two leading
neural ranking architectures, namely BERT and ConvKNRM, using both pointwise
and pairwise losses. When applied to a BERT-based ranker, our method yields up
to a 4% improvement in MRR and a 9% improvement in P@1 (compared to the model
trained without a curriculum). This results in models that can achieve
comparable performance to more expensive state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long
Estimating Node Importance in Knowledge Graphs Using Graph Neural Networks
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG
is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including
question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a
method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which
enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and
resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to
address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information
available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship
between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore
supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent
advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based
method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting
node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores
instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism
and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing
methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different
characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.Comment: KDD 2019 Research Track. 11 pages. Changelog: Type 3 font removed,
and minor updates made in the Appendix (v2
Transfer Meets Hybrid: A Synthetic Approach for Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering with Text
Collaborative filtering (CF) is the key technique for recommender systems
(RSs). CF exploits user-item behavior interactions (e.g., clicks) only and
hence suffers from the data sparsity issue. One research thread is to integrate
auxiliary information such as product reviews and news titles, leading to
hybrid filtering methods. Another thread is to transfer knowledge from other
source domains such as improving the movie recommendation with the knowledge
from the book domain, leading to transfer learning methods. In real-world life,
no single service can satisfy a user's all information needs. Thus it motivates
us to exploit both auxiliary and source information for RSs in this paper. We
propose a novel neural model to smoothly enable Transfer Meeting Hybrid (TMH)
methods for cross-domain recommendation with unstructured text in an end-to-end
manner. TMH attentively extracts useful content from unstructured text via a
memory module and selectively transfers knowledge from a source domain via a
transfer network. On two real-world datasets, TMH shows better performance in
terms of three ranking metrics by comparing with various baselines. We conduct
thorough analyses to understand how the text content and transferred knowledge
help the proposed model.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, a full version for the WWW 2019 short pape
Constructing Datasets for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension Across Documents
Most Reading Comprehension methods limit themselves to queries which can be
answered using a single sentence, paragraph, or document. Enabling models to
combine disjoint pieces of textual evidence would extend the scope of machine
comprehension methods, but currently there exist no resources to train and test
this capability. We propose a novel task to encourage the development of models
for text understanding across multiple documents and to investigate the limits
of existing methods. In our task, a model learns to seek and combine evidence -
effectively performing multi-hop (alias multi-step) inference. We devise a
methodology to produce datasets for this task, given a collection of
query-answer pairs and thematically linked documents. Two datasets from
different domains are induced, and we identify potential pitfalls and devise
circumvention strategies. We evaluate two previously proposed competitive
models and find that one can integrate information across documents. However,
both models struggle to select relevant information, as providing documents
guaranteed to be relevant greatly improves their performance. While the models
outperform several strong baselines, their best accuracy reaches 42.9% compared
to human performance at 74.0% - leaving ample room for improvement.Comment: This paper directly corresponds to the TACL version
(https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/1325) apart from minor
changes in wording, additional footnotes, and appendice
Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs
Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines
- …