10 research outputs found
Learning to Expand: Reinforced Pseudo-relevance Feedback Selection for Information-seeking Conversations
Intelligent personal assistant systems for information-seeking conversations
are increasingly popular in real-world applications, especially for e-commerce
companies. With the development of research in such conversation systems, the
pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) has demonstrated its effectiveness in
incorporating relevance signals from external documents. However, the existing
studies are either based on heuristic rules or require heavy manual labeling.
In this work, we treat the PRF selection as a learning task and proposed a
reinforced learning based method that can be trained in an end-to-end manner
without any human annotations. More specifically, we proposed a reinforced
selector to extract useful PRF terms to enhance response candidates and a BERT
based response ranker to rank the PRF-enhanced responses. The performance of
the ranker serves as rewards to guide the selector to extract useful PRF terms,
and thus boost the task performance. Extensive experiments on both standard
benchmark and commercial datasets show the superiority of our reinforced PRF
term selector compared with other potential soft or hard selection methods.
Both qualitative case studies and quantitative analysis show that our model can
not only select meaningful PRF terms to expand response candidates but also
achieve the best results compared with all the baseline methods on a variety of
evaluation metrics. We have also deployed our method on online production in an
e-commerce company, which shows a significant improvement over the existing
online ranking system
Response Ranking with Deep Matching Networks and External Knowledge in Information-seeking Conversation Systems
Intelligent personal assistant systems with either text-based or voice-based
conversational interfaces are becoming increasingly popular around the world.
Retrieval-based conversation models have the advantages of returning fluent and
informative responses. Most existing studies in this area are on open domain
"chit-chat" conversations or task / transaction oriented conversations. More
research is needed for information-seeking conversations. There is also a lack
of modeling external knowledge beyond the dialog utterances among current
conversational models. In this paper, we propose a learning framework on the
top of deep neural matching networks that leverages external knowledge for
response ranking in information-seeking conversation systems. We incorporate
external knowledge into deep neural models with pseudo-relevance feedback and
QA correspondence knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments with three
information-seeking conversation data sets including both open benchmarks and
commercial data show that, our methods outperform various baseline methods
including several deep text matching models and the state-of-the-art method on
response selection in multi-turn conversations. We also perform analysis over
different response types, model variations and ranking examples. Our models and
research findings provide new insights on how to utilize external knowledge
with deep neural models for response selection and have implications for the
design of the next generation of information-seeking conversation systems.Comment: Accepted by the 41th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research
and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018), Ann Arbor, Michigan,
U.S.A. July 8-12, 2018 (Full Oral Paper
Harnessing Evolution of Multi-Turn Conversations for Effective Answer Retrieval
With the improvements in speech recognition and voice generation technologies
over the last years, a lot of companies have sought to develop conversation
understanding systems that run on mobile phones or smart home devices through
natural language interfaces. Conversational assistants, such as Google
Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, can help users to complete various types of
tasks. This requires an accurate understanding of the user's information need
as the conversation evolves into multiple turns. Finding relevant context in a
conversation's history is challenging because of the complexity of natural
language and the evolution of a user's information need. In this work, we
present an extensive analysis of language, relevance, dependency of user
utterances in a multi-turn information-seeking conversation. To this aim, we
have annotated relevant utterances in the conversations released by the TREC
CaST 2019 track. The annotation labels determine which of the previous
utterances in a conversation can be used to improve the current one.
Furthermore, we propose a neural utterance relevance model based on BERT
fine-tuning, outperforming competitive baselines. We study and compare the
performance of multiple retrieval models, utilizing different strategies to
incorporate the user's context. The experimental results on both classification
and retrieval tasks show that our proposed approach can effectively identify
and incorporate the conversation context. We show that processing the current
utterance using the predicted relevant utterance leads to a 38% relative
improvement in terms of nDCG@20. Finally, to foster research in this area, we
have released the dataset of the annotations.Comment: To appear in ACM CHIIR 2020, Vancouver, BC, Canad
M茅s que mil paraules: Funcionament i estat de la q眉esti贸 de la cerca i recuperaci贸 d'informaci贸 multim猫dia basada en el contingut
Treballs Finals de Grau d'Informaci贸 i Documentaci贸, Facultat d'Informaci贸 i Mitjans Audiovisuals, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2018-2019, Gema Santos-HermosaEl creixement exponencial de la documentaci贸 multim猫dia des de la popularitzaci贸 d鈥橧nternet, i en especial,
des de l鈥檃parici贸 dels tel猫fons intel路ligents, ha provocat que la recuperaci贸 d鈥檃quests continguts amb metadades associades necessiti metodologies de cerca addicionals i sistemes de recuperaci贸 d鈥檌nformaci贸 adaptats a les necessitats d鈥檃quests continguts.
La cerca i recuperaci贸 d鈥檌nformaci贸 basada en el seu contingut 茅s un camp d鈥檌nvestigaci贸 de plena vig猫ncia,
polifac猫tic i que implica un coneixement pluridisciplinari per a la seva aplicaci贸. 脡s un camp que implica
con猫ixer com es descriu, com se cerca i com es recupera la informaci贸, els processos de reconeixement de
patrons per ordinador i el seu funcionament, i en alguns casos, la interacci贸 i integraci贸 en sistemes m茅s
complexos que van m茅s enll脿 de la simple consulta-resposta per part de l鈥檜suari.
De fet, l鈥櫭簊 d鈥檃quests sistemes est脿 tan integrat en d鈥檃ltres que tant les cerques com les recuperacions
acaben per ser processos interns d鈥檜n programari tancat. Per exemple, en el cas de la conducci贸 assistida,
la captaci贸 i interpretaci贸 d鈥檌matges est脿 completament gestionada per l鈥檕rdinador de bord del vehicle.
Els processos que intervenen en el reconeixement d鈥檕bjectes en moviment que fa el vehicle s贸n els mateixos
que es farien en una cerca d鈥檌matge amb una altra imatge: s鈥檌dentifica un cos m貌bil i en resposta a la
tipologia, el vehicle adapta gradualment la velocitat o en cas d鈥檃van莽ament, la traject貌ria, per mantenir
dist脿ncies de seguretat.
En altres casos, hi ha una interacci贸 directa entre el sistema de recuperaci贸 d鈥檌nformaci贸 basat en el
contingut i l鈥檜suari que cerca una resposta concreta, a vegades sense ser del tot conscient dels
procediments de cerca que ha utilitzat el sistema. Per exemple, l鈥檜suari captura una can莽贸 amb Shazam,
que li retorna el t铆tol de la can莽贸 i el grup; per貌 la seva intenci贸 final probablement no 茅s la
recuperaci贸 d鈥檌nformaci贸 en si mateixa, sin贸 la possibilitat de poder tornar a escoltar-la m茅s tard,
aix铆 que l鈥檃plicaci贸 d贸na l鈥檕pci贸 o b茅 de comprar-la en una botiga digital o incl煤s afegir-la a un
servei de m煤sica en streaming. En definitiva, la cerca i recuperaci贸 d鈥檌nformaci贸 multim猫dia forma part
de moltes tecnologies no nom茅s de present, sin贸 de futur, i que forma i formar脿 part de diferents serveis
de recuperaci贸 d鈥檌nformaci贸 multim猫dia.
Aquest treball pret茅n entendre el funcionament d鈥檃quests sistemes i establir un estat de la q眉esti贸 sobre la
recuperaci贸 i cerca d鈥檌nformaci贸 basada en el contingut. En altres paraules, entendre i con猫ixer l鈥檃plicaci贸
i implicacions de l鈥櫭簊 d鈥檃quells sistemes on, en comptes d鈥檌ntroduir una consulta textual, l鈥檜suari introdueix
imatges, sons o incl煤s petits fragments de v铆deo per obtenir-ne d鈥檃ltres o informacions textuals associades