3,678 research outputs found
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
Table Search Using a Deep Contextualized Language Model
Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved
impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks.
Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora,
pretrained models can capture complex syntactic word relations. In this paper,
we use the deep contextualized language model BERT for the task of ad hoc table
retrieval. We investigate how to encode table content considering the table
structure and input length limit of BERT. We also propose an approach that
incorporates features from prior literature on table retrieval and jointly
trains them with BERT. In experiments on public datasets, we show that our best
approach can outperform the previous state-of-the-art method and BERT baselines
with a large margin under different evaluation metrics.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (Long
Efficient Document Re-Ranking for Transformers by Precomputing Term Representations
Deep pretrained transformer networks are effective at various ranking tasks,
such as question answering and ad-hoc document ranking. However, their
computational expenses deem them cost-prohibitive in practice. Our proposed
approach, called PreTTR (Precomputing Transformer Term Representations),
considerably reduces the query-time latency of deep transformer networks (up to
a 42x speedup on web document ranking) making these networks more practical to
use in a real-time ranking scenario. Specifically, we precompute part of the
document term representations at indexing time (without a query), and merge
them with the query representation at query time to compute the final ranking
score. Due to the large size of the token representations, we also propose an
effective approach to reduce the storage requirement by training a compression
layer to match attention scores. Our compression technique reduces the storage
required up to 95% and it can be applied without a substantial degradation in
ranking performance.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long
Query Resolution for Conversational Search with Limited Supervision
In this work we focus on multi-turn passage retrieval as a crucial component
of conversational search. One of the key challenges in multi-turn passage
retrieval comes from the fact that the current turn query is often
underspecified due to zero anaphora, topic change, or topic return. Context
from the conversational history can be used to arrive at a better expression of
the current turn query, defined as the task of query resolution. In this paper,
we model the query resolution task as a binary term classification problem: for
each term appearing in the previous turns of the conversation decide whether to
add it to the current turn query or not. We propose QuReTeC (Query Resolution
by Term Classification), a neural query resolution model based on bidirectional
transformers. We propose a distant supervision method to automatically generate
training data by using query-passage relevance labels. Such labels are often
readily available in a collection either as human annotations or inferred from
user interactions. We show that QuReTeC outperforms state-of-the-art models,
and furthermore, that our distant supervision method can be used to
substantially reduce the amount of human-curated data required to train
QuReTeC. We incorporate QuReTeC in a multi-turn, multi-stage passage retrieval
architecture and demonstrate its effectiveness on the TREC CAsT dataset.Comment: SIGIR 2020 full conference pape
Critically Examining the "Neural Hype": Weak Baselines and the Additivity of Effectiveness Gains from Neural Ranking Models
Is neural IR mostly hype? In a recent SIGIR Forum article, Lin expressed
skepticism that neural ranking models were actually improving ad hoc retrieval
effectiveness in limited data scenarios. He provided anecdotal evidence that
authors of neural IR papers demonstrate "wins" by comparing against weak
baselines. This paper provides a rigorous evaluation of those claims in two
ways: First, we conducted a meta-analysis of papers that have reported
experimental results on the TREC Robust04 test collection. We do not find
evidence of an upward trend in effectiveness over time. In fact, the best
reported results are from a decade ago and no recent neural approach comes
close. Second, we applied five recent neural models to rerank the strong
baselines that Lin used to make his arguments. A significant improvement was
observed for one of the models, demonstrating additivity in gains. While there
appears to be merit to neural IR approaches, at least some of the gains
reported in the literature appear illusory.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International ACM
SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR
2019
Information Retrieval: Recent Advances and Beyond
In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the models used for
information retrieval in the first and second stages of the typical processing
chain. We discuss the current state-of-the-art models, including methods based
on terms, semantic retrieval, and neural. Additionally, we delve into the key
topics related to the learning process of these models. This way, this survey
offers a comprehensive understanding of the field and is of interest for for
researchers and practitioners entering/working in the information retrieval
domain
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