341 research outputs found
Reliability and effectiveness of clickthrough data for automatic image annotation
Automatic image annotation using supervised learning is performed by concept classifiers trained on labelled example images. This work proposes the use of clickthrough data collected from search logs as a source for the automatic generation of concept training data, thus avoiding the expensive manual annotation effort. We investigate and evaluate this approach using a collection of 97,628 photographic images. The results indicate that the contribution of search log based training data is positive despite their inherent noise; in particular, the combination of manual and automatically generated training data outperforms the use of manual data alone. It is therefore possible to use clickthrough data to perform large-scale image annotation with little manual annotation effort or, depending on performance, using only the automatically generated training data. An extensive presentation of the experimental results and the accompanying data can be accessed at http://olympus.ee.auth.gr/~diou/civr2009/
Learning to merge search results for efficient Distributed Information Retrieval
Merging search results from different servers is a major problem in Distributed Information Retrieval. We used Regression-SVM and Ranking-SVM which would learn a function that merges results based on information that is readily available: i.e. the ranks, titles, summaries and URLs contained in the results pages. By not downloading additional information, such as the full document, we decrease bandwidth usage. CORI and Round Robin merging were used as our baselines; surprisingly, our results show that the SVM-methods do not improve over those baselines
End-to-End Neural Ad-hoc Ranking with Kernel Pooling
This paper proposes K-NRM, a kernel based neural model for document ranking.
Given a query and a set of documents, K-NRM uses a translation matrix that
models word-level similarities via word embeddings, a new kernel-pooling
technique that uses kernels to extract multi-level soft match features, and a
learning-to-rank layer that combines those features into the final ranking
score. The whole model is trained end-to-end. The ranking layer learns desired
feature patterns from the pairwise ranking loss. The kernels transfer the
feature patterns into soft-match targets at each similarity level and enforce
them on the translation matrix. The word embeddings are tuned accordingly so
that they can produce the desired soft matches. Experiments on a commercial
search engine's query log demonstrate the improvements of K-NRM over prior
feature-based and neural-based states-of-the-art, and explain the source of
K-NRM's advantage: Its kernel-guided embedding encodes a similarity metric
tailored for matching query words to document words, and provides effective
multi-level soft matches
Community Interest as An Indicator for Ranking
Ranking documents in response to users\u27 information needs is a challenging task, due, in part, to the dynamic nature of users\u27 interests with respect to a query. We hypothesize that the interests of a given user are similar to the interests of the broader community of which he or she is a part and propose an innovative method that uses social media to characterize the interests of the community and use this characterization to improve future rankings. By generating a community interest vector (CIV) and community interest language model (CILM) for a given query, we use community interest to alter the ranking score of individual documents retrieved by the query. The CIV or CILM is based on a continuously updated set of recent (daily or past few hours) user oriented text data. The interest based ranking method is evaluated by using Amazon Turk to against relevance based ranking and search engines\u27 ranking results. Overall, the experiment result shows community interest is an effective indicator for dynamic ranking
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
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