42,554 research outputs found
Structural Regularities in Text-based Entity Vector Spaces
Entity retrieval is the task of finding entities such as people or products
in response to a query, based solely on the textual documents they are
associated with. Recent semantic entity retrieval algorithms represent queries
and experts in finite-dimensional vector spaces, where both are constructed
from text sequences.
We investigate entity vector spaces and the degree to which they capture
structural regularities. Such vector spaces are constructed in an unsupervised
manner without explicit information about structural aspects. For concreteness,
we address these questions for a specific type of entity: experts in the
context of expert finding. We discover how clusterings of experts correspond to
committees in organizations, the ability of expert representations to encode
the co-author graph, and the degree to which they encode academic rank. We
compare latent, continuous representations created using methods based on
distributional semantics (LSI), topic models (LDA) and neural networks
(word2vec, doc2vec, SERT). Vector spaces created using neural methods, such as
doc2vec and SERT, systematically perform better at clustering than LSI, LDA and
word2vec. When it comes to encoding entity relations, SERT performs best.Comment: ICTIR2017. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on the
Theory of Information Retrieval. 201
Neural Vector Spaces for Unsupervised Information Retrieval
We propose the Neural Vector Space Model (NVSM), a method that learns
representations of documents in an unsupervised manner for news article
retrieval. In the NVSM paradigm, we learn low-dimensional representations of
words and documents from scratch using gradient descent and rank documents
according to their similarity with query representations that are composed from
word representations. We show that NVSM performs better at document ranking
than existing latent semantic vector space methods. The addition of NVSM to a
mixture of lexical language models and a state-of-the-art baseline vector space
model yields a statistically significant increase in retrieval effectiveness.
Consequently, NVSM adds a complementary relevance signal. Next to semantic
matching, we find that NVSM performs well in cases where lexical matching is
needed.
NVSM learns a notion of term specificity directly from the document
collection without feature engineering. We also show that NVSM learns
regularities related to Luhn significance. Finally, we give advice on how to
deploy NVSM in situations where model selection (e.g., cross-validation) is
infeasible. We find that an unsupervised ensemble of multiple models trained
with different hyperparameter values performs better than a single
cross-validated model. Therefore, NVSM can safely be used for ranking documents
without supervised relevance judgments.Comment: TOIS 201
Least Squares Ranking on Graphs
Given a set of alternatives to be ranked, and some pairwise comparison data,
ranking is a least squares computation on a graph. The vertices are the
alternatives, and the edge values comprise the comparison data. The basic idea
is very simple and old: come up with values on vertices such that their
differences match the given edge data. Since an exact match will usually be
impossible, one settles for matching in a least squares sense. This formulation
was first described by Leake in 1976 for rankingfootball teams and appears as
an example in Professor Gilbert Strang's classic linear algebra textbook. If
one is willing to look into the residual a little further, then the problem
really comes alive, as shown effectively by the remarkable recent paper of
Jiang et al. With or without this twist, the humble least squares problem on
graphs has far-reaching connections with many current areas ofresearch. These
connections are to theoretical computer science (spectral graph theory, and
multilevel methods for graph Laplacian systems); numerical analysis (algebraic
multigrid, and finite element exterior calculus); other mathematics (Hodge
decomposition, and random clique complexes); and applications (arbitrage, and
ranking of sports teams). Not all of these connections are explored in this
paper, but many are. The underlying ideas are easy to explain, requiring only
the four fundamental subspaces from elementary linear algebra. One of our aims
is to explain these basic ideas and connections, to get researchers in many
fields interested in this topic. Another aim is to use our numerical
experiments for guidance on selecting methods and exposing the need for further
development.Comment: Added missing references, comparison of linear solvers overhauled,
conclusion section added, some new figures adde
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