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Language Models
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Exploring Topic-based Language Models for Effective Web Information Retrieval
The main obstacle for providing focused search is the relative opaqueness of search request -- searchers tend to express their complex information needs in only a couple of keywords. Our overall aim is to find out if, and how, topic-based language models can lead to more effective web information retrieval. In this paper we explore retrieval performance of a topic-based model that combines topical models with other language models based on cross-entropy. We first define our topical categories and train our topical models on the .GOV2 corpus by building parsimonious language models. We then test the topic-based model on TREC8 small Web data collection for ad-hoc search.Our experimental results show that the topic-based model outperforms the standard language model and parsimonious model
Rhetorical relations for information retrieval
Typically, every part in most coherent text has some plausible reason for its
presence, some function that it performs to the overall semantics of the text.
Rhetorical relations, e.g. contrast, cause, explanation, describe how the parts
of a text are linked to each other. Knowledge about this socalled discourse
structure has been applied successfully to several natural language processing
tasks. This work studies the use of rhetorical relations for Information
Retrieval (IR): Is there a correlation between certain rhetorical relations and
retrieval performance? Can knowledge about a document's rhetorical relations be
useful to IR? We present a language model modification that considers
rhetorical relations when estimating the relevance of a document to a query.
Empirical evaluation of different versions of our model on TREC settings shows
that certain rhetorical relations can benefit retrieval effectiveness notably
(> 10% in mean average precision over a state-of-the-art baseline)
Word-Entity Duet Representations for Document Ranking
This paper presents a word-entity duet framework for utilizing knowledge
bases in ad-hoc retrieval. In this work, the query and documents are modeled by
word-based representations and entity-based representations. Ranking features
are generated by the interactions between the two representations,
incorporating information from the word space, the entity space, and the
cross-space connections through the knowledge graph. To handle the
uncertainties from the automatically constructed entity representations, an
attention-based ranking model AttR-Duet is developed. With back-propagation
from ranking labels, the model learns simultaneously how to demote noisy
entities and how to rank documents with the word-entity duet. Evaluation
results on TREC Web Track ad-hoc task demonstrate that all of the four-way
interactions in the duet are useful, the attention mechanism successfully
steers the model away from noisy entities, and together they significantly
outperform both word-based and entity-based learning to rank systems
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