Auditing Search Engines for Differential Satisfaction Across Demographics

Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing concerns that these services may systematically underserve some groups of users. In this paper, we present a framework for internally auditing such services for differences in user satisfaction across demographic groups, using search engines as a case study. We first explain the pitfalls of na\"ively comparing the behavioral metrics that are commonly used to evaluate search engines. We then propose three methods for measuring latent differences in user satisfaction from observed differences in evaluation metrics. To develop these methods, we drew on ideas from the causal inference literature and the multilevel modeling literature. Our framework is broadly applicable to other online services, and provides general insight into interpreting their evaluation metrics.Comment: 8 pages Accepted at WWW 201

An interactive two-dimensional approach to query aspects rewriting in systematic reviews. IMS unipd at CLEF eHealth task 2

International audienc

Sequence to Sequence Learning for Query Expansion

Using sequence to sequence algorithms for query expansion has not been explored yet in Information Retrieval literature nor in Question-Answering's. We tried to fill this gap in the literature with a custom Query Expansion engine trained and tested on open datasets. Starting from open datasets, we built a Query Expansion training set using sentence-embeddings-based Keyword Extraction. We therefore assessed the ability of the Sequence to Sequence neural networks to capture expanding relations in the words embeddings' space.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, AAAI-19 Student Abstract and Poster Progra

Utilizing sub-topical structure of documents for information retrieval.

Text segmentation in natural language processing typically refers to the process of decomposing a document into constituent subtopics. Our work centers on the application of text segmentation techniques within information retrieval (IR) tasks. For example, for scoring a document by combining the retrieval scores of its constituent segments, exploiting the proximity of query terms in documents for ad-hoc search, and for question answering (QA), where retrieved passages from multiple documents are aggregated and presented as a single document to a searcher. Feedback in ad hoc IR task is shown to benefit from the use of extracted sentences instead of terms from the pseudo relevant documents for query expansion. Retrieval effectiveness for patent prior art search task is enhanced by applying text segmentation to the patent queries. Another aspect of our work involves augmenting text segmentation techniques to produce segments which are more readable with less unresolved anaphora. This is particularly useful for QA and snippet generation tasks where the objective is to aggregate relevant and novel information from multiple documents satisfying user information need on one hand, and ensuring that the automatically generated content presented to the user is easily readable without reference to the original source document

Learning to Attend, Copy, and Generate for Session-Based Query Suggestion

Users try to articulate their complex information needs during search sessions by reformulating their queries. To make this process more effective, search engines provide related queries to help users in specifying the information need in their search process. In this paper, we propose a customized sequence-to-sequence model for session-based query suggestion. In our model, we employ a query-aware attention mechanism to capture the structure of the session context. is enables us to control the scope of the session from which we infer the suggested next query, which helps not only handle the noisy data but also automatically detect session boundaries. Furthermore, we observe that, based on the user query reformulation behavior, within a single session a large portion of query terms is retained from the previously submitted queries and consists of mostly infrequent or unseen terms that are usually not included in the vocabulary. We therefore empower the decoder of our model to access the source words from the session context during decoding by incorporating a copy mechanism. Moreover, we propose evaluation metrics to assess the quality of the generative models for query suggestion. We conduct an extensive set of experiments and analysis. e results suggest that our model outperforms the baselines both in terms of the generating queries and scoring candidate queries for the task of query suggestion.Comment: Accepted to be published at The 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2017

A Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder For Generative Context-Aware Query Suggestion

Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a probabilistic suggestion model that is able to account for sequences of previous queries of arbitrary lengths. Our novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder architecture allows the model to be sensitive to the order of queries in the context while avoiding data sparsity. Additionally, our model can suggest for rare, or long-tail, queries. The produced suggestions are synthetic and are sampled one word at a time, using computationally cheap decoding techniques. This is in contrast to current synthetic suggestion models relying upon machine learning pipelines and hand-engineered feature sets. Results show that it outperforms existing context-aware approaches in a next query prediction setting. In addition to query suggestion, our model is general enough to be used in a variety of other applications.Comment: To appear in Conference of Information Knowledge and Management (CIKM) 201