KITAB: Evaluating LLMs on Constraint Satisfaction for Information Retrieval

We study the ability of state-of-the art models to answer constraint satisfaction queries for information retrieval (e.g., 'a list of ice cream shops in San Diego'). In the past, such queries were considered to be tasks that could only be solved via web-search or knowledge bases. More recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated initial emergent abilities in this task. However, many current retrieval benchmarks are either saturated or do not measure constraint satisfaction. Motivated by rising concerns around factual incorrectness and hallucinations of LLMs, we present KITAB, a new dataset for measuring constraint satisfaction abilities of language models. KITAB consists of book-related data across more than 600 authors and 13,000 queries, and also offers an associated dynamic data collection and constraint verification approach for acquiring similar test data for other authors. Our extended experiments on GPT4 and GPT3.5 characterize and decouple common failure modes across dimensions such as information popularity, constraint types, and context availability. Results show that in the absence of context, models exhibit severe limitations as measured by irrelevant information, factual errors, and incompleteness, many of which exacerbate as information popularity decreases. While context availability mitigates irrelevant information, it is not helpful for satisfying constraints, identifying fundamental barriers to constraint satisfaction. We open source our contributions to foster further research on improving constraint satisfaction abilities of future models.Comment: 23 page

Information extraction from Webpages based on DOM distances

Retrieving information from Internet is a difficult task as it is demonstrated by the lack of real-time tools able to extract information from webpages. The main cause is that most webpages in Internet are implemented using plain (X)HTML which is a language that lacks structured semantic information. For this reason much of the efforts in this area have been directed to the development of techniques for URLs extraction. This field has produced good results implemented by modern search engines. But, contrarily, extracting information from a single webpage has produced poor results or very limited tools. In this work we define a novel technique for information extraction from single webpages or collections of interconnected webpages. This technique is based on DOM distances to retrieve information. This allows the technique to work with any webpage and, thus, to retrieve information online. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the technique.Castillo, C.; Valero Llinares, H.; Guadalupe Ramos, J.; Silva Galiana, JF. (2012). Information extraction from Webpages based on DOM distances. En Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Springer Verlag (Germany). 181-193. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28601-8_16S181193Dalvi, B., Cohen, W.W., Callan, J.: Websets: Extracting sets of entities from the web using unsupervised information extraction. Technical report, Carnegie Mellon School of computer Science (2011)Kushmerick, N., Weld, D.S., Doorenbos, R.: Wrapper induction for information extraction. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 1997) (1997)Cohen, W.W., Hurst, M., Jensen, L.S.: A flexible learning system for wrapping tables and lists in html documents. In: Proceedings of the international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2002), pp. 232–241 (2002)Lee, P.Y., Hui, S.C., Fong, A.C.M.: Neural networks for web content filtering. IEEE Intelligent Systems 17(5), 48–57 (2002)Anti-Porn Parental Controls Software. Porn Filtering (March 2010), http://www.tueagles.com/anti-porn/Kang, B.-Y., Kim, H.-G.: Web page filtering for domain ontology with the context of concept. IEICE - Trans. Inf. Syst. E90, D859–D862 (2007)Henzinger, M.: The Past, Present and Future of Web Information Retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 23th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (2004)W3C Consortium. Resource Description Framework (RDF), www.w3.org/RDFW3C Consortium. Web Ontology Language (OWL), www.w3.org/2004/OWLMicroformats.org. The Official Microformats Site (2009), http://microformats.orgKhare, R., Çelik, T.: Microformats: a Pragmatic Path to the Semantic Web. In: Proceedings of the 15h International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 865–866 (2006)Khare, R.: Microformats: The Next (Small) Thing on the Semantic Web? IEEE Internet Computing 10(1), 68–75 (2006)Gupta, S., et al.: Automating Content Extraction of HTML Documents. World Wide Archive 8(2), 179–224 (2005)Li, P., Liu, M., Lin, Y., Lai, Y.: Accelerating Web Content Filtering by the Early Decision Algorithm. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems E91-D, 251–257 (2008)W3C Consortium, Document Object Model (DOM), www.w3.org/DOMBaeza-Yates, R., Castillo, C.: Crawling the Infinite Web: Five Levels Are Enough. In: Leonardi, S. (ed.) WAW 2004. LNCS, vol. 3243, pp. 156–167. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Micarelli, A., Gasparetti, F.: Adaptative Focused Crawling. In: The Adaptative Web, pp. 231–262 (2007)Nielsen, J.: Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis (2010) ISBN 1-56205-810-XZhang, J.: Visualization for Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) ISBN 3-54075-1475Hearst, M.A.: TileBars: Visualization of Term Distribution Information. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver, CO, pp. 59–66 (May 1995)Gottron, T.: Evaluating Content Extraction on HTML Documents. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications, pp. 123–132 (2007)Apache Foundation. The Apache crawler Nutch (2010), http://nutch.apache.or

Video Stream Retrieval of Unseen Queries using Semantic Memory

Retrieval of live, user-broadcast video streams is an under-addressed and increasingly relevant challenge. The on-line nature of the problem requires temporal evaluation and the unforeseeable scope of potential queries motivates an approach which can accommodate arbitrary search queries. To account for the breadth of possible queries, we adopt a no-example approach to query retrieval, which uses a query's semantic relatedness to pre-trained concept classifiers. To adapt to shifting video content, we propose memory pooling and memory welling methods that favor recent information over long past content. We identify two stream retrieval tasks, instantaneous retrieval at any particular time and continuous retrieval over a prolonged duration, and propose means for evaluating them. Three large scale video datasets are adapted to the challenge of stream retrieval. We report results for our search methods on the new stream retrieval tasks, as well as demonstrate their efficacy in a traditional, non-streaming video task.Comment: Presented at BMVC 2016, British Machine Vision Conference, 201

Venturing into the labyrinth: the information retrieval challenge of human digital memories

Advances in digital capture and storage technologies mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in a Human Digital Memory (HDM). However, these vast personal archives are of little benefit if an individual cannot locate and retrieve significant items from them. While potentially offering exciting opportunities to support a user in their activities by providing access to information stored from previous experiences, we believe that the features of HDM datasets present new research challenges for information retrieval which must be addressed if these possibilities are to be realised. Specifically we postulate that effective retrieval from HDMs must exploit the rich sources of context data which can be captured and associated with items stored within them. User’s memories of experiences stored within their memory archive will often be linked to these context features. We suggest how such contextual metadata can be exploited within the retrieval process

Easy on that trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval

We examine the effects of new technologies for digital photography on people's longer term storage and access to collections of personal photos. We report an empirical study of parents' ability to retrieve photos related to salient family events from more than a year ago. Performance was relatively poor with people failing to find almost 40% of pictures. We analyze participants' organizational and access strategies to identify reasons for this poor performance. Possible reasons for retrieval failure include: storing too many pictures, rudimentary organization, use of multiple storage systems, failure to maintain collections and participants' false beliefs about their ability to access photos. We conclude by exploring the technical and theoretical implications of these findings

Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory Using the SenseCam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory using the sensecam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Memories for Life: A Review of the Science and Technology

This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, Memories for Life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines

CHORUS Deliverable 4.4: Report of the 2nd CHORUS Conference

The Second CHORUS Conference and third Yahoo! Research Workshop on the Future of Web Search was held during April 4-5, 2008, in Granvalira, Andorra to discuss future directions in multi-medial information access and other specialised topics in the near future of retrieval. Attendance was at capacity, with 97 participants from 11 countries and 3 continents

Easy on that trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval

We examine the effects of new technologies for digital photography on people's longer term storage and access to collections of personal photos. We report an empirical study of parents' ability to retrieve photos related to salient family events from more than a year ago. Performance was relatively poor with people failing to find almost 40% of pictures. We analyze participants' organizational and access strategies to identify reasons for this poor performance. Possible reasons for retrieval failure include: storing too many pictures, rudimentary organization, use of multiple storage systems, failure to maintain collections and participants' false beliefs about their ability to access photos. We conclude by exploring the technical and theoretical implications of these findings