4,767 research outputs found
Benchmarking news recommendations: the CLEF NewsREEL use case
The CLEF NewsREEL challenge is a campaign-style evaluation lab allowing participants to evaluate and optimize news recommender algorithms. The goal is to create an algorithm that is able to generate news items that users would click, respecting a strict time constraint. The lab challenges participants to compete in either a "living lab" (Task 1) or perform an evaluation that replays recorded streams (Task 2). In this report, we discuss the objectives and challenges of the NewsREEL lab, summarize last year's campaign and outline the main research challenges that can be addressed by participating in NewsREEL 2016
Query Expansion with Locally-Trained Word Embeddings
Continuous space word embeddings have received a great deal of attention in
the natural language processing and machine learning communities for their
ability to model term similarity and other relationships. We study the use of
term relatedness in the context of query expansion for ad hoc information
retrieval. We demonstrate that word embeddings such as word2vec and GloVe, when
trained globally, underperform corpus and query specific embeddings for
retrieval tasks. These results suggest that other tasks benefiting from global
embeddings may also benefit from local embeddings
Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning
While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every
day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for
non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are
suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data
by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval
system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our
model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict
relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during
training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly
outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and
Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some
examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short
Deriving query suggestions for site search
Modern search engines have been moving away from simplistic interfaces that aimed at satisfying a user's need with a single-shot query. Interactive features are now integral parts of web search engines. However, generating good query modification suggestions remains a challenging issue. Query log analysis is one of the major strands of work in this direction. Although much research has been performed on query logs collected on the web as a whole, query log analysis to enhance search on smaller and more focused collections has attracted less attention, despite its increasing practical importance. In this article, we report on a systematic study of different query modification methods applied to a substantial query log collected on a local website that already uses an interactive search engine. We conducted experiments in which we asked users to assess the relevance of potential query modification suggestions that have been constructed using a range of log analysis methods and different baseline approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of log analysis to extract query modification suggestions. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that a more fine-grained approach than grouping search requests into sessions allows for extraction of better refinement terms from query log files. © 2013 ASIS&T
Enhanced information retrieval using domain-specific recommender models
The objective of an information retrieval (IR) system is to retrieve relevant items which meet a user information need. There is currently significant interest in personalized IR which seeks to improve IR effectiveness by incorporating a model of the user’s interests. However, in some situations
there may be no opportunity to learn about the interests of a specific user on a certain topic. In our work, we propose an IR approach which combines a recommender algorithm with IR methods to improve retrieval for domains where the system has no opportunity to learn prior information about the user’s knowledge of a domain for which they have not previously entered a query. We use search data from other previous users interested in the same topic to build a
recommender model for this topic. When a user enters a query on a topic, new to this user, an appropriate recommender model is selected and used to predict a ranking which the user may find interesting based on the behaviour of previous
users with similar queries. The recommender output is integrated with a standard IR method in a weighted linear combination to provide a final result for the user. Experiments using the INEX 2009 data collection with a simulated recommender training set show that our approach can improve on a baseline IR system
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
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