15,261 research outputs found
Validating simulated interaction for retrieval evaluation
A searcher’s interaction with a retrieval system consists of actions such as query formulation, search result list interaction and document interaction. The simulation of searcher interaction has recently gained momentum in the analysis and evaluation of interactive information retrieval (IIR). However, a key issue that has not yet been adequately addressed is the validity of such IIR simulations and whether they reliably predict the performance obtained by a searcher across the session. The aim of this paper is to determine the validity of the common interaction model (CIM) typically used for simulating multi-query sessions. We focus on search result interactions, i.e., inspecting snippets, examining documents and deciding when to stop examining the results of a single query, or when to stop the whole session. To this end, we run a series of simulations grounded by real world behavioral data to show how accurate and responsive the model is to various experimental conditions under which the data were produced. We then validate on a second real world data set derived under similar experimental conditions. We seek to predict cumulated gain across the session. We find that the interaction model with a query-level stopping strategy based on consecutive non-relevant snippets leads to the highest prediction accuracy, and lowest deviation from ground truth, around 9 to 15% depending on the experimental conditions. To our knowledge, the present study is the first validation effort of the CIM that shows that the model’s acceptance and use is justified within IIR evaluations. We also identify and discuss ways to further improve the CIM and its behavioral parameters for more accurate simulations
Reply With: Proactive Recommendation of Email Attachments
Email responses often contain items-such as a file or a hyperlink to an
external document-that are attached to or included inline in the body of the
message. Analysis of an enterprise email corpus reveals that 35% of the time
when users include these items as part of their response, the attachable item
is already present in their inbox or sent folder. A modern email client can
proactively retrieve relevant attachable items from the user's past emails
based on the context of the current conversation, and recommend them for
inclusion, to reduce the time and effort involved in composing the response. In
this paper, we propose a weakly supervised learning framework for recommending
attachable items to the user. As email search systems are commonly available,
we constrain the recommendation task to formulating effective search queries
from the context of the conversations. The query is submitted to an existing IR
system to retrieve relevant items for attachment. We also present a novel
strategy for generating labels from an email corpus---without the need for
manual annotations---that can be used to train and evaluate the query
formulation model. In addition, we describe a deep convolutional neural network
that demonstrates satisfactory performance on this query formulation task when
evaluated on the publicly available Avocado dataset and a proprietary dataset
of internal emails obtained through an employee participation program.Comment: CIKM2017. Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management. 201
Neural Ranking Models with Weak Supervision
Despite the impressive improvements achieved by unsupervised deep neural
networks in computer vision and NLP tasks, such improvements have not yet been
observed in ranking for information retrieval. The reason may be the complexity
of the ranking problem, as it is not obvious how to learn from queries and
documents when no supervised signal is available. Hence, in this paper, we
propose to train a neural ranking model using weak supervision, where labels
are obtained automatically without human annotators or any external resources
(e.g., click data). To this aim, we use the output of an unsupervised ranking
model, such as BM25, as a weak supervision signal. We further train a set of
simple yet effective ranking models based on feed-forward neural networks. We
study their effectiveness under various learning scenarios (point-wise and
pair-wise models) and using different input representations (i.e., from
encoding query-document pairs into dense/sparse vectors to using word embedding
representation). We train our networks using tens of millions of training
instances and evaluate it on two standard collections: a homogeneous news
collection(Robust) and a heterogeneous large-scale web collection (ClueWeb).
Our experiments indicate that employing proper objective functions and letting
the networks to learn the input representation based on weakly supervised data
leads to impressive performance, with over 13% and 35% MAP improvements over
the BM25 model on the Robust and the ClueWeb collections. Our findings also
suggest that supervised neural ranking models can greatly benefit from
pre-training on large amounts of weakly labeled data that can be easily
obtained from unsupervised IR models.Comment: In proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2017
CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines
Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective.
The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines.
From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research
Generalized Team Draft Interleaving
Interleaving is an online evaluation method that compares
two ranking functions by mixing their results and interpret-
ing the users' click feedback. An important property of
an interleaving method is its sensitivity, i.e. the ability to
obtain reliable comparison outcomes with few user interac-
tions. Several methods have been proposed so far to im-
prove interleaving sensitivity, which can be roughly divided
into two areas: (a) methods that optimize the credit assign-
ment function (how the click feedback is interpreted), and
(b) methods that achieve higher sensitivity by controlling
the interleaving policy (how often a particular interleaved
result page is shown).
In this paper, we propose an interleaving framework that
generalizes the previously studied interleaving methods in
two aspects. First, it achieves a higher sensitivity by per-
forming a joint data-driven optimization of the credit as-
signment function and the interleaving policy. Second, we
formulate the framework to be general w.r.t. the search do-
main where the interleaving experiment is deployed, so that
it can be applied in domains with grid-based presentation,
such as image search. In order to simplify the optimization,
we additionally introduce a stratifed estimate of the exper-
iment outcome. This stratifcation is also useful on its own,
as it reduces the variance of the outcome and thus increases
the interleaving sensitivity.
We perform an extensive experimental study using large-
scale document and image search datasets obtained from
a commercial search engine. The experiments show that
our proposed framework achieves marked improvements in
sensitivity over efective baselines on both datasets
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