TED Talk Recommender Using Speech Transcripts

Nowadays, online video platforms mostly recommend related videos by analyzing user-driven data such as viewing patterns, rather than the content of the videos. However, content is more important than any other element when videos aim to deliver knowledge. Therefore, we have developed a web application which recommends related TED lecture videos to the users, considering the content of the videos from the transcripts. TED Talk Recommender constructs a network for recommending videos that are similar content-wise and providing a user interface.Comment: 3 page

MatchZoo: A Learning, Practicing, and Developing System for Neural Text Matching

Text matching is the core problem in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, question answering, and conversation. Recently, deep leaning technology has been widely adopted for text matching, making neural text matching a new and active research domain. With a large number of neural matching models emerging rapidly, it becomes more and more difficult for researchers, especially those newcomers, to learn and understand these new models. Moreover, it is usually difficult to try these models due to the tedious data pre-processing, complicated parameter configuration, and massive optimization tricks, not to mention the unavailability of public codes sometimes. Finally, for researchers who want to develop new models, it is also not an easy task to implement a neural text matching model from scratch, and to compare with a bunch of existing models. In this paper, therefore, we present a novel system, namely MatchZoo, to facilitate the learning, practicing and designing of neural text matching models. The system consists of a powerful matching library and a user-friendly and interactive studio, which can help researchers: 1) to learn state-of-the-art neural text matching models systematically, 2) to train, test and apply these models with simple configurable steps; and 3) to develop their own models with rich APIs and assistance

Critically Examining the "Neural Hype": Weak Baselines and the Additivity of Effectiveness Gains from Neural Ranking Models

Is neural IR mostly hype? In a recent SIGIR Forum article, Lin expressed skepticism that neural ranking models were actually improving ad hoc retrieval effectiveness in limited data scenarios. He provided anecdotal evidence that authors of neural IR papers demonstrate "wins" by comparing against weak baselines. This paper provides a rigorous evaluation of those claims in two ways: First, we conducted a meta-analysis of papers that have reported experimental results on the TREC Robust04 test collection. We do not find evidence of an upward trend in effectiveness over time. In fact, the best reported results are from a decade ago and no recent neural approach comes close. Second, we applied five recent neural models to rerank the strong baselines that Lin used to make his arguments. A significant improvement was observed for one of the models, demonstrating additivity in gains. While there appears to be merit to neural IR approaches, at least some of the gains reported in the literature appear illusory.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019