Multi-Perspective Relevance Matching with Hierarchical ConvNets for Social Media Search

Despite substantial interest in applications of neural networks to information retrieval, neural ranking models have only been applied to standard ad hoc retrieval tasks over web pages and newswire documents. This paper proposes MP-HCNN (Multi-Perspective Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network) a novel neural ranking model specifically designed for ranking short social media posts. We identify document length, informal language, and heterogeneous relevance signals as features that distinguish documents in our domain, and present a model specifically designed with these characteristics in mind. Our model uses hierarchical convolutional layers to learn latent semantic soft-match relevance signals at the character, word, and phrase levels. A pooling-based similarity measurement layer integrates evidence from multiple types of matches between the query, the social media post, as well as URLs contained in the post. Extensive experiments using Twitter data from the TREC Microblog Tracks 2011--2014 show that our model significantly outperforms prior feature-based as well and existing neural ranking models. To our best knowledge, this paper presents the first substantial work tackling search over social media posts using neural ranking models.Comment: AAAI 2019, 10 page

A Time-Aware Approach to Improving Ad-hoc Information Retrieval from Microblogs

There is an immense number of short-text documents produced as the result of microblogging. The content produced is growing as the number of microbloggers grows, and as active microbloggers continue to post millions of updates. The range of topics discussed is so vast, that microblogs provide an abundance of useful information. In this work, the problem of retrieving the most relevant information in microblogs is addressed. Interesting temporal patterns were found in the initial analysis of the study. Therefore the focus of the current work is to first exploit a temporal variable in order to see how effectively it can be used to predict the relevance of the tweets and, then, to include it in a retrieval weighting model along with other tweet-specific features. Generalized Linear Mixed-effect Models (GLMMs) are used to analyze the features and to propose two re-ranking models. These two models were developed through an exploratory process on a training set and then were evaluated on a test set

Temporal Information Models for Real-Time Microblog Search

Real-time search in Twitter and other social media services is often biased towards the most recent results due to the “in the moment” nature of topic trends and their ephemeral relevance to users and media in general. However, “in the moment”, it is often difficult to look at all emerging topics and single-out the important ones from the rest of the social media chatter. This thesis proposes to leverage on external sources to estimate the duration and burstiness of live Twitter topics. It extends preliminary research where itwas shown that temporal re-ranking using external sources could indeed improve the accuracy of results. To further explore this topic we pursued three significant novel approaches: (1) multi-source information analysis that explores behavioral dynamics of users, such as Wikipedia live edits and page view streams, to detect topic trends and estimate the topic interest over time; (2) efficient methods for federated query expansion towards the improvement of query meaning; and (3) exploiting multiple sources towards the detection of temporal query intent. It differs from past approaches in the sense that it will work over real-time queries, leveraging on live user-generated content. This approach contrasts with previous methods that require an offline preprocessing step

Hyperlink-extended pseudo relevance feedback for improved microblog retrieval

Microblog retrieval has received much attention in recent years due to the wide spread of social microblogging platforms such as Twitter. The main motive behind microblog retrieval is to serve users searching a big collection of microblogs a list of relevant documents (microblogs) matching their search needs. What makes microblog retrieval different from normal web retrieval is the short length of the user queries and the documents that you search in, which leads to a big vocabulary mismatch problem. Many research studies investigated different approaches for microblog retrieval. Query expansion is one of the approaches that showed stable performance for improving microblog retrieval effectiveness. Query expansion is used mainly to overcome the vocabulary mismatch problem between user queries and short relevant documents. In our work, we investigate existing query expansion method (Pseudo Relevance Feedback - PRF) comprehensively, and propose an extension using the information from hyperlinks attached to the top relevant documents. Our experimental results on TREC microblog data showed that Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) alone could outperform many retrieval approaches if configured properly. We showed that combining the expansion terms with the original query by a weight, not to dilute the effect of the original query, could lead to superior results. The weighted combine of the expansion terms is different than what is commonly used in the literature by appending the expansion terms to the original query without weighting. We experimented using different weighting schemes, and empirically found that assigning a small weight for the expansion terms 0.2, and 0.8 for the original query performs the best for the three evaluation sets 2011, 2012, and 2013. We applied the previous weighting scheme to the most reported PRF configuration used in the literature and measured the retrieval performance. The P@30 performance achieved using our weighting scheme was 0.485, 0.4136, and 0.4811 compared to 0.4585, 0.3548, and 0.3861 without applying weighting for the three evaluation sets 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. The MAP performance achieved using our weighting scheme was 0.4386, 0.2845, and 0.3262 compared to 0.3592, 0.2074, and 0.2256 without applying weighting for the three evaluation sets 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. Results also showed that utilizing hyperlinked documents attached to the top relevant tweets in query expansion improves the results over traditional PRF. By utilizing hyperlinked documents in the query expansion our best runs achieved 0.5000, 0.4339, and 0.5546 P@30 compared to 0.4864, 0.4203, and 0.5322 when applying traditional PRF, and 0.4587, 0.3044, and 0.3584 MAP when applying traditional PRF compared to 0.4405, 0.2850, and 0.3492 when utilizing the hyperlinked document contents (using web page titles, and meta-descriptions) for the three evaluation sets 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. We explored different types of information extracted from the hyperlinked documents; we show that using the document titles and meta-descriptions helps in improving the retrieval performance the most. On the other hand, using the meta- keywords degraded the retrieval performance. For the test set released in 2013, using our hyperlinked-extended approach achieved the best improvement over the PRF baseline, 0.5546 P@30 compared to 0.5322 and 0.3584 MAP compared to 0.3492. For the test sets released in 2011 and 2012 we got less improvements over PRF, 0.5000, 0.4339 P@30 compared to 0.4864, 0.4203, and 0.4587, 0.3044 MAP compared to 0.4405, 0.2850. We showed that this behavior was due to the age of the collection, where a lot of hyperlinked documents were taken down or moved and we couldn\u27t get their information. Our best results achieved using hyperlink-extended PRF achieved statistically significant improvements over the traditional PRF for the test sets released in 2011, and 2013 using paired t-test with p-value \u3c 0.05. Moreover, our proposed approach outperformed the best results reported at TREC microblog track for the years 2011, and 2013, which applied more sophisticated algorithms. Our proposed approach achieved 0.5000, 0.5546 P@30 compared to 0.4551, 0.5528 achieved by the best runs in TREC, and 0.4587, 0.3584 MAP compared to 0.3350, 0.3524 for the evaluation sets of 2011 and 2013 respectively. The main contributions of our work can be listed as follows: 1. Providing a comprehensive study for the usage of traditional PRF with microblog retrieval using various configurations. 2. Introducing a hyperlink-based PRF approach for microblog retrieval by utilizing hyperlinks embedded in initially retrieved tweets, which showed a significant improvement to retrieval effectiveness

ON RELEVANCE FILTERING FOR REAL-TIME TWEET SUMMARIZATION

Real-time tweet summarization systems (RTS) require mechanisms for capturing relevant tweets, identifying novel tweets, and capturing timely tweets. In this thesis, we tackle the RTS problem with a main focus on the relevance filtering. We experimented with different traditional retrieval models. Additionally, we propose two extensions to alleviate the sparsity and topic drift challenges that affect the relevance filtering. For the sparsity, we propose leveraging word embeddings in Vector Space model (VSM) term weighting to empower the system to use semantic similarity alongside the lexical matching. To mitigate the effect of topic drift, we exploit explicit relevance feedback to enhance profile representation to cope with its development in the stream over time. We conducted extensive experiments over three standard English TREC test collections that were built specifically for RTS. Although the extensions do not generally exhibit better performance, they are comparable to the baselines used. Moreover, we extended an event detection Arabic tweets test collection, called EveTAR, to support tasks that require novelty in the system's output. We collected novelty judgments using in-house annotators and used the collection to test our RTS system. We report preliminary results on EveTAR using different models of the RTS system.This work was made possible by NPRP grants # NPRP 7-1313-1-245 and # NPRP 7-1330-2-483 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation)

Sentiment analysis and real-time microblog search

This thesis sets out to examine the role played by sentiment in real-time microblog search. The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user query at a given point in time, automated methods are required to enable users to sift through this information. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling the text content in microblog streams. In this thesis we review the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis, with a specific focus on microblogging. We propose a system and method for evaluating the effect of sentiment on perceived search quality in real-time microblog search scenarios. Initially we provide an evaluation of sentiment analysis using supervised learning for classi- fying the short, informal content in microblog posts. We then evaluate our sentiment-based filtering system for microblog search in a user study with simulated real-time scenarios. Lastly, we conduct real-time user studies for the live broadcast of the popular television programme, the X Factor, and for the Leaders Debate during the Irish General Election. We find that we are able to satisfactorily classify positive, negative and neutral sentiment in microblog posts. We also find a significant role played by sentiment in many microblog search scenarios, observing some detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users’ prior topic sentiment

Terms interrelationship query expansion to improve accuracy of Quran search

Quran retrieval system is becoming an instrument for users to search for needed information. The search engine is one of the most popular search engines that successfully implemented for searching relevant verses queries. However, a major challenge to the Quran search engine is word ambiguities, specifically lexical ambiguities. With the advent of query expansion techniques for Quran retrieval systems, the performance of the Quran retrieval system has problem and issue in terms of retrieving users needed information. The results of the current semantic techniques still lack precision values without considering several semantic dictionaries. Therefore, this study proposes a stemmed terms interrelationship query expansion approach to improve Quran search results. More specifically, related terms were collected from different semantic dictionaries and then utilize to get roots of words using a stemming algorithm. To assess the performance of the stemmed terms interrelationship query expansion, experiments were conducted using eight Quran datasets from the Tanzil website. Overall, the results indicate that the stemmed terms interrelationship query expansion is superior to unstemmed terms interrelationship query expansion in Mean Average Precision with Yusuf Ali 68%, Sarawar 67%, Arberry 72%, Malay 65%, Hausa 62%, Urdu 62%, Modern Arabic 60% and Classical Arabic 59%

Exploiting Social Media Sources for Search, Fusion and Evaluation

The web contains heterogeneous information that is generated with different characteristics and is presented via different media. Social media, as one of the largest content carriers, has generated information from millions of users worldwide, creating material rapidly in all types of forms such as comments, images, tags, videos and ratings, etc. In social applications, the formation of online communities contributes to conversations of substantially broader aspects, as well as unfiltered opinions about subjects that are rarely covered in public media. Information accrued on social platforms, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to augment web sources such as Wikipedia or news pages, which are usually characterized as being more formal. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate in depth how social data can be exploited and applied in the context of three fundamental information retrieval (IR) tasks: search, fusion, and evaluation. Improving search performance has consistently been a major focus in the IR community. Given the in-depth discussions and active interactions contained in social media, we present approaches to incorporating this type of data to improve search on general web corpora. In particular, we propose two graph-based frameworks, social anchor and information network, to associate related web and social content, where information sources of diverse characteristics can be used to complement each other in a unified manner. We investigate how the enriched representation can potentially reduce vocabulary mismatch and improve retrieval effectiveness. Presenting social media content to users is valuable particularly for queries intended for time-sensitive events or community opinions. Current major search engines commonly blend results from different search services (or verticals) into core web results. Motivated by this real-world need, we explore ways to merge results from different web and social services into a single ranked list. We present an optimization framework for fusion, where impact of documents, ranked lists, and verticals can be modeled simultaneously to maximize performance. Evaluating search system performance has largely relied on creating reusable test collections in IR. Traditional ways to creating evaluation sets can require substantial manual effort. To reduce such effort, we explore an approach to automating the process of collecting pairs of queries and relevance judgments, using high quality social media, Community Question Answering (CQA). Our approach is based on the idea that CQA services support platforms for users to raise questions and to share answers, therefore encoding the associations between real user information needs and real user assessments. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches, we conduct extensive retrieval and fusion experiments, as well as verify the reliability of the new, CQA-based evaluation test sets