39,686 research outputs found
Learning to Rank Academic Experts in the DBLP Dataset
Expert finding is an information retrieval task that is concerned with the
search for the most knowledgeable people with respect to a specific topic, and
the search is based on documents that describe people's activities. The task
involves taking a user query as input and returning a list of people who are
sorted by their level of expertise with respect to the user query. Despite
recent interest in the area, the current state-of-the-art techniques lack in
principled approaches for optimally combining different sources of evidence.
This article proposes two frameworks for combining multiple estimators of
expertise. These estimators are derived from textual contents, from
graph-structure of the citation patterns for the community of experts, and from
profile information about the experts. More specifically, this article explores
the use of supervised learning to rank methods, as well as rank aggregation
approaches, for combing all of the estimators of expertise. Several supervised
learning algorithms, which are representative of the pointwise, pairwise and
listwise approaches, were tested, and various state-of-the-art data fusion
techniques were also explored for the rank aggregation framework. Experiments
that were performed on a dataset of academic publications from the Computer
Science domain attest the adequacy of the proposed approaches.Comment: Expert Systems, 2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1302.041
Simulation of within-session query variations using a text segmentation approach
We propose a generative model for automatic query refor-
mulations from an initial query using the underlying subtopic structure of top ranked retrieved documents. We address three types of query reformulations a) specialization; b) generalization; and c) drift. To test
our model we generate the three reformulation variants starting with selected fields from the TREC-8 topics as the initial queries. We use manual judgments from multiple assessors to calculate the accuracy of the reformulated query variants and observe accuracies of 65%, 82% and 69%
respectively for specialization, generalization and drift reformulations
Relation Discovery from Web Data for Competency Management
This paper describes a technique for automatically discovering associations between people and expertise from an analysis of very large data sources (including web pages, blogs and emails), using a family of algorithms that perform accurate named-entity recognition, assign different weights to terms according to an analysis of document structure, and access distances between terms in a document. My contribution is to add a social networking approach called BuddyFinder which relies on associations within a large enterprise-wide "buddy list" to help delimit the search space and also to provide a form of 'social triangulation' whereby the system can discover documents from your colleagues that contain pertinent information about you. This work has been influential in the information retrieval community generally, as it is the basis of a landmark system that achieved overall first place in every category in the Enterprise Search Track of TREC2006
NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval
Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is commonly used to boost the performance of
traditional information retrieval (IR) models by using top-ranked documents to
identify and weight new query terms, thereby reducing the effect of
query-document vocabulary mismatches. While neural retrieval models have
recently demonstrated strong results for ad-hoc retrieval, combining them with
PRF is not straightforward due to incompatibilities between existing PRF
approaches and neural architectures. To bridge this gap, we propose an
end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models
by embedding different neural models as building blocks. Extensive experiments
on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed NPRF
framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR
models.Comment: Full paper in EMNLP 201
Consistency and Variation in Kernel Neural Ranking Model
This paper studies the consistency of the kernel-based neural ranking model
K-NRM, a recent state-of-the-art neural IR model, which is important for
reproducible research and deployment in the industry. We find that K-NRM has
low variance on relevance-based metrics across experimental trials. In spite of
this low variance in overall performance, different trials produce different
document rankings for individual queries. The main source of variance in our
experiments was found to be different latent matching patterns captured by
K-NRM. In the IR-customized word embeddings learned by K-NRM, the
query-document word pairs follow two different matching patterns that are
equally effective, but align word pairs differently in the embedding space. The
different latent matching patterns enable a simple yet effective approach to
construct ensemble rankers, which improve K-NRM's effectiveness and
generalization abilities.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
Neural Architecture for Question Answering Using a Knowledge Graph and Web Corpus
In Web search, entity-seeking queries often trigger a special Question
Answering (QA) system. It may use a parser to interpret the question to a
structured query, execute that on a knowledge graph (KG), and return direct
entity responses. QA systems based on precise parsing tend to be brittle: minor
syntax variations may dramatically change the response. Moreover, KG coverage
is patchy. At the other extreme, a large corpus may provide broader coverage,
but in an unstructured, unreliable form. We present AQQUCN, a QA system that
gracefully combines KG and corpus evidence. AQQUCN accepts a broad spectrum of
query syntax, between well-formed questions to short `telegraphic' keyword
sequences. In the face of inherent query ambiguities, AQQUCN aggregates signals
from KGs and large corpora to directly rank KG entities, rather than commit to
one semantic interpretation of the query. AQQUCN models the ideal
interpretation as an unobservable or latent variable. Interpretations and
candidate entity responses are scored as pairs, by combining signals from
multiple convolutional networks that operate collectively on the query, KG and
corpus. On four public query workloads, amounting to over 8,000 queries with
diverse query syntax, we see 5--16% absolute improvement in mean average
precision (MAP), compared to the entity ranking performance of recent systems.
Our system is also competitive at entity set retrieval, almost doubling F1
scores for challenging short queries.Comment: Accepted to Information Retrieval Journa
- …