Setting per-field normalisation hyper-parameters for the named-page finding search task

Per-field normalisation has been shown to be effective for Web search tasks, e.g. named-page finding. However, per-field normalisation also suffers from having hyper-parameters to tune on a per-field basis. In this paper, we argue that the purpose of per-field normalisation is to adjust the linear relationship between field length and term frequency. We experiment with standard Web test collections, using three document fields, namely the body of the document, its title, and the anchor text of its incoming links. From our experiments, we find that across different collections, the linear correlation values, given by the optimised hyper-parameter settings, are proportional to the maximum negative linear correlation. Based on this observation, we devise an automatic method for setting the per-field normalisation hyper-parameter values without the use of relevance assessment for tuning. According to the evaluation results, this method is shown to be effective for the body and title fields. In addition, the difficulty in setting the per-field normalisation hyper-parameter for the anchor text field is explained

Semantic Sort: A Supervised Approach to Personalized Semantic Relatedness

We propose and study a novel supervised approach to learning statistical semantic relatedness models from subjectively annotated training examples. The proposed semantic model consists of parameterized co-occurrence statistics associated with textual units of a large background knowledge corpus. We present an efficient algorithm for learning such semantic models from a training sample of relatedness preferences. Our method is corpus independent and can essentially rely on any sufficiently large (unstructured) collection of coherent texts. Moreover, the approach facilitates the fitting of semantic models for specific users or groups of users. We present the results of extensive range of experiments from small to large scale, indicating that the proposed method is effective and competitive with the state-of-the-art.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures A short version of this paper was already published at ECML/PKDD 201

Deep Item-based Collaborative Filtering for Top-N Recommendation

Item-based Collaborative Filtering(short for ICF) has been widely adopted in recommender systems in industry, owing to its strength in user interest modeling and ease in online personalization. By constructing a user's profile with the items that the user has consumed, ICF recommends items that are similar to the user's profile. With the prevalence of machine learning in recent years, significant processes have been made for ICF by learning item similarity (or representation) from data. Nevertheless, we argue that most existing works have only considered linear and shallow relationship between items, which are insufficient to capture the complicated decision-making process of users. In this work, we propose a more expressive ICF solution by accounting for the nonlinear and higher-order relationship among items. Going beyond modeling only the second-order interaction (e.g. similarity) between two items, we additionally consider the interaction among all interacted item pairs by using nonlinear neural networks. Through this way, we can effectively model the higher-order relationship among items, capturing more complicated effects in user decision-making. For example, it can differentiate which historical itemsets in a user's profile are more important in affecting the user to make a purchase decision on an item. We treat this solution as a deep variant of ICF, thus term it as DeepICF. To justify our proposal, we perform empirical studies on two public datasets from MovieLens and Pinterest. Extensive experiments verify the highly positive effect of higher-order item interaction modeling with nonlinear neural networks. Moreover, we demonstrate that by more fine-grained second-order interaction modeling with attention network, the performance of our DeepICF method can be further improved.Comment: 25 pages, submitted to TOI

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