10,171 research outputs found
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
Content-Based Weak Supervision for Ad-Hoc Re-Ranking
One challenge with neural ranking is the need for a large amount of
manually-labeled relevance judgments for training. In contrast with prior work,
we examine the use of weak supervision sources for training that yield pseudo
query-document pairs that already exhibit relevance (e.g., newswire
headline-content pairs and encyclopedic heading-paragraph pairs). We also
propose filtering techniques to eliminate training samples that are too far out
of domain using two techniques: a heuristic-based approach and novel supervised
filter that re-purposes a neural ranker. Using several leading neural ranking
architectures and multiple weak supervision datasets, we show that these
sources of training pairs are effective on their own (outperforming prior weak
supervision techniques), and that filtering can further improve performance.Comment: SIGIR 2019 (short paper
Modeling Temporal Evidence from External Collections
Newsworthy events are broadcast through multiple mediums and prompt the
crowds to produce comments on social media. In this paper, we propose to
leverage on this behavioral dynamics to estimate the most relevant time periods
for an event (i.e., query). Recent advances have shown how to improve the
estimation of the temporal relevance of such topics. In this approach, we build
on two major novelties. First, we mine temporal evidences from hundreds of
external sources into topic-based external collections to improve the
robustness of the detection of relevant time periods. Second, we propose a
formal retrieval model that generalizes the use of the temporal dimension
across different aspects of the retrieval process. In particular, we show that
temporal evidence of external collections can be used to (i) infer a topic's
temporal relevance, (ii) select the query expansion terms, and (iii) re-rank
the final results for improved precision. Experiments with TREC Microblog
collections show that the proposed time-aware retrieval model makes an
effective and extensive use of the temporal dimension to improve search results
over the most recent temporal models. Interestingly, we observe a strong
correlation between precision and the temporal distribution of retrieved and
relevant documents.Comment: To appear in WSDM 201
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
Relevance-based Word Embedding
Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also
known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural
language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are
typically learned based on term proximity in a large corpus. This means that
the objective in well-known word embedding algorithms, e.g., word2vec, is to
accurately predict adjacent word(s) for a given word or context. However, this
objective is not necessarily equivalent to the goal of many information
retrieval (IR) tasks. The primary objective in various IR tasks is to capture
relevance instead of term proximity, syntactic, or even semantic similarity.
This is the motivation for developing unsupervised relevance-based word
embedding models that learn word representations based on query-document
relevance information. In this paper, we propose two learning models with
different objective functions; one learns a relevance distribution over the
vocabulary set for each query, and the other classifies each term as belonging
to the relevant or non-relevant class for each query. To train our models, we
used over six million unique queries and the top ranked documents retrieved in
response to each query, which are assumed to be relevant to the query. We
extrinsically evaluate our learned word representation models using two IR
tasks: query expansion and query classification. Both query expansion
experiments on four TREC collections and query classification experiments on
the KDD Cup 2005 dataset suggest that the relevance-based word embedding models
significantly outperform state-of-the-art proximity-based embedding models,
such as word2vec and GloVe.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '17
Entity Query Feature Expansion Using Knowledge Base Links
Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base
construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and
query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large
general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google
Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity
annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open
research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to
improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion
approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this
paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature
expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from
entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured
attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity
annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC
text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity
links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data.
We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant
improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text
expansion approaches
TopSig: Topology Preserving Document Signatures
Performance comparisons between File Signatures and Inverted Files for text
retrieval have previously shown several significant shortcomings of file
signatures relative to inverted files. The inverted file approach underpins
most state-of-the-art search engine algorithms, such as Language and
Probabilistic models. It has been widely accepted that traditional file
signatures are inferior alternatives to inverted files. This paper describes
TopSig, a new approach to the construction of file signatures. Many advances in
semantic hashing and dimensionality reduction have been made in recent times,
but these were not so far linked to general purpose, signature file based,
search engines. This paper introduces a different signature file approach that
builds upon and extends these recent advances. We are able to demonstrate
significant improvements in the performance of signature file based indexing
and retrieval, performance that is comparable to that of state of the art
inverted file based systems, including Language models and BM25. These findings
suggest that file signatures offer a viable alternative to inverted files in
suitable settings and from the theoretical perspective it positions the file
signatures model in the class of Vector Space retrieval models.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, CIKM 201
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