28,373 research outputs found
Unbiased Learning to Rank with Unbiased Propensity Estimation
Learning to rank with biased click data is a well-known challenge. A variety
of methods has been explored to debias click data for learning to rank such as
click models, result interleaving and, more recently, the unbiased
learning-to-rank framework based on inverse propensity weighting. Despite their
differences, most existing studies separate the estimation of click bias
(namely the \textit{propensity model}) from the learning of ranking algorithms.
To estimate click propensities, they either conduct online result
randomization, which can negatively affect the user experience, or offline
parameter estimation, which has special requirements for click data and is
optimized for objectives (e.g. click likelihood) that are not directly related
to the ranking performance of the system. In this work, we address those
problems by unifying the learning of propensity models and ranking models. We
find that the problem of estimating a propensity model from click data is a
dual problem of unbiased learning to rank. Based on this observation, we
propose a Dual Learning Algorithm (DLA) that jointly learns an unbiased ranker
and an \textit{unbiased propensity model}. DLA is an automatic unbiased
learning-to-rank framework as it directly learns unbiased ranking models from
biased click data without any preprocessing. It can adapt to the change of bias
distributions and is applicable to online learning. Our empirical experiments
with synthetic and real-world data show that the models trained with DLA
significantly outperformed the unbiased learning-to-rank algorithms based on
result randomization and the models trained with relevance signals extracted by
click models
Investigating Retrieval Method Selection with Axiomatic Features
We consider algorithm selection in the context of ad-hoc information retrieval. Given a query and a pair of retrieval methods, we propose a meta-learner that predicts how to combine the methods' relevance scores into an overall relevance score. Inspired by neural models' different properties with regard to IR axioms, these predictions are based on features that quantify axiom-related properties of the query and its top ranked documents. We conduct an evaluation on TREC Web Track data and find that the meta-learner often significantly improves over the individual methods. Finally, we conduct feature and query weight analyses to investigate the meta-learner's behavior
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
Knowledge-based Query Expansion in Real-Time Microblog Search
Since the length of microblog texts, such as tweets, is strictly limited to
140 characters, traditional Information Retrieval techniques suffer from the
vocabulary mismatch problem severely and cannot yield good performance in the
context of microblogosphere. To address this critical challenge, in this paper,
we propose a new language modeling approach for microblog retrieval by
inferring various types of context information. In particular, we expand the
query using knowledge terms derived from Freebase so that the expanded one can
better reflect users' search intent. Besides, in order to further satisfy
users' real-time information need, we incorporate temporal evidences into the
expansion method, which can boost recent tweets in the retrieval results with
respect to a given topic. Experimental results on two official TREC Twitter
corpora demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over baseline
methods.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
Extending weighting models with a term quality measure
Weighting models use lexical statistics, such as term frequencies, to derive term weights, which are used to estimate the relevance of a document to a query. Apart from the removal of stopwords, there is no other consideration of the quality of words that are being ‘weighted’. It is often assumed that term frequency is a good indicator for a decision to be made as to how relevant a document is to a query. Our intuition is that raw term frequency could be enhanced to better discriminate between terms. To do so, we propose using non-lexical features to predict the ‘quality’ of words, before they are weighted for retrieval. Specifically, we show how parts of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs) can help estimate how informative a word generally is, regardless of its relevance to a query/document. Experimental results with two standard TREC collections show that integrating the proposed term quality to two established weighting models enhances retrieval performance, over a baseline that uses the original weighting models, at all times
- …