Interpretable Low-Rank Document Representations with Label-Dependent Sparsity Patterns

In context of document classification, where in a corpus of documents their label tags are readily known, an opportunity lies in utilizing label information to learn document representation spaces with better discriminative properties. To this end, in this paper application of a Variational Bayesian Supervised Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (supervised vbNMF) with label-driven sparsity structure of coefficients is proposed for learning of discriminative nonsubtractive latent semantic components occuring in TF-IDF document representations. Constraints are such that the components pursued are made to be frequently occuring in a small set of labels only, making it possible to yield document representations with distinctive label-specific sparse activation patterns. A simple measure of quality of this kind of sparsity structure, dubbed inter-label sparsity, is introduced and experimentally brought into tight connection with classification performance. Representing a great practical convenience, inter-label sparsity is shown to be easily controlled in supervised vbNMF by a single parameter

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

Exploiting Sentence Embedding for Medical Question Answering

Despite the great success of word embedding, sentence embedding remains a not-well-solved problem. In this paper, we present a supervised learning framework to exploit sentence embedding for the medical question answering task. The learning framework consists of two main parts: 1) a sentence embedding producing module, and 2) a scoring module. The former is developed with contextual self-attention and multi-scale techniques to encode a sentence into an embedding tensor. This module is shortly called Contextual self-Attention Multi-scale Sentence Embedding (CAMSE). The latter employs two scoring strategies: Semantic Matching Scoring (SMS) and Semantic Association Scoring (SAS). SMS measures similarity while SAS captures association between sentence pairs: a medical question concatenated with a candidate choice, and a piece of corresponding supportive evidence. The proposed framework is examined by two Medical Question Answering(MedicalQA) datasets which are collected from real-world applications: medical exam and clinical diagnosis based on electronic medical records (EMR). The comparison results show that our proposed framework achieved significant improvements compared to competitive baseline approaches. Additionally, a series of controlled experiments are also conducted to illustrate that the multi-scale strategy and the contextual self-attention layer play important roles for producing effective sentence embedding, and the two kinds of scoring strategies are highly complementary to each other for question answering problems.Comment: 8 page

Visualising and animating visual information foraging in context

Optimal information foraging provides a potentially useful framework for modelling, analysing, and interpreting search strategies of users through a spatial-semantic interface. Improving the understanding of behavioural patterns of users in such environments has implications for the design and refinement of a range of user interfaces. In this article, we outline the role of optimal information foraging in the study of visual information retrieval and how one may use visualisation and animation techniques to put behavioural patterns in context. Behavioural patterns of information foraging in an information space are visualised and animated to aid further in-depth analysis of search strategies

Enriching videos with light semantics

This paper describes an ongoing prototypical framework to annotate and retrieve web videos with light semantics. The proposed framework reuses many existing vocabularies along with a video model. The knowledge is captured from three different information spaces (media content, context, document). We also describe ways to extract the semantic content descriptions from the existing usergenerated content using multiple approaches of linguistic processing and Named Entity Recognition, which are later identified with DBpedia resources to establish meanings for the tags. Finally, the implemented prototype is described with multiple search interfaces and retrieval processes. Evaluation on semantic enrichment shows a considerable (50% of videos) improvement in content description