34,962 research outputs found
Fact Checking in Community Forums
Community Question Answering (cQA) forums are very popular nowadays, as they
represent effective means for communities around particular topics to share
information. Unfortunately, this information is not always factual. Thus, here
we explore a new dimension in the context of cQA, which has been ignored so
far: checking the veracity of answers to particular questions in cQA forums. As
this is a new problem, we create a specialized dataset for it. We further
propose a novel multi-faceted model, which captures information from the answer
content (what is said and how), from the author profile (who says it), from the
rest of the community forum (where it is said), and from external authoritative
sources of information (external support). Evaluation results show a MAP value
of 86.54, which is 21 points absolute above the baseline.Comment: AAAI-2018; Fact-Checking; Veracity; Community-Question Answering;
Neural Networks; Distributed Representation
User Intent Prediction in Information-seeking Conversations
Conversational assistants are being progressively adopted by the general
population. However, they are not capable of handling complicated
information-seeking tasks that involve multiple turns of information exchange.
Due to the limited communication bandwidth in conversational search, it is
important for conversational assistants to accurately detect and predict user
intent in information-seeking conversations. In this paper, we investigate two
aspects of user intent prediction in an information-seeking setting. First, we
extract features based on the content, structural, and sentiment
characteristics of a given utterance, and use classic machine learning methods
to perform user intent prediction. We then conduct an in-depth feature
importance analysis to identify key features in this prediction task. We find
that structural features contribute most to the prediction performance. Given
this finding, we construct neural classifiers to incorporate context
information and achieve better performance without feature engineering. Our
findings can provide insights into the important factors and effective methods
of user intent prediction in information-seeking conversations.Comment: Accepted to CHIIR 201
Entity Ranking on Graphs: Studies on Expert Finding
Todays web search engines try to offer services for finding various information in addition to simple web pages, like showing locations or answering simple fact queries. Understanding the association of named entities and documents is one of the key steps towards such semantic search tasks. This paper addresses the ranking of entities and models it in a graph-based relevance propagation framework. In particular we study the problem of expert finding as an example of an entity ranking task. Entity containment graphs are introduced that represent the relationship between text fragments on the one hand and their contained entities on the other hand. The paper shows how these graphs can be used to propagate relevance information from the pre-ranked text fragments to their entities. We use this propagation framework to model existing approaches to expert finding based on the entity's indegree and extend them by recursive relevance propagation based on a probabilistic random walk over the entity containment graphs. Experiments on the TREC expert search task compare the retrieval performance of the different graph and propagation models
Soft peer review: social software and distributed scientific evaluation
The debate on the prospects of peer-review in the Internet age and the
increasing criticism leveled against the dominant role of impact factor
indicators are calling for new measurable criteria to assess scientific quality.
Usage-based metrics offer a new avenue to scientific quality assessment but
face the same risks as first generation search engines that used unreliable
metrics (such as raw traffic data) to estimate content quality. In this article I
analyze the contribution that social bookmarking systems can provide to the
problem of usage-based metrics for scientific evaluation. I suggest that
collaboratively aggregated metadata may help fill the gap between traditional
citation-based criteria and raw usage factors. I submit that bottom-up,
distributed evaluation models such as those afforded by social bookmarking
will challenge more traditional quality assessment models in terms of coverage,
efficiency and scalability. Services aggregating user-related quality indicators
for online scientific content will come to occupy a key function in the scholarly
communication system
Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda
Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry
Leveraging Social Foci for Information Seeking in Social Media
The rise of social media provides a great opportunity for people to reach out
to their social connections to satisfy their information needs. However,
generic social media platforms are not explicitly designed to assist
information seeking of users. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to
identify the social connections of a user able to satisfy his information
needs. The information need of a social media user is subjective and personal,
and we investigate the utility of his social context to identify people able to
satisfy it. We present questions users post on Twitter as instances of
information seeking activities in social media. We infer soft community
memberships of the asker and his social connections by integrating network and
content information. Drawing concepts from the social foci theory, we identify
answerers who share communities with the asker w.r.t. the question. Our
experiments demonstrate that the framework is effective in identifying
answerers to social media questions.Comment: AAAI 201
Discovering Authorities as a function of time in Community Question Answering
Community Question Answering (CQA) websites such as Stack Over
ow provide a great platform
to ask questions and get answers. Such platforms serve the purpose of helping the community of
people who look for answers. The platforms thrive as a result of a small group of people known as
experts who provide quality answers to question posters.
There has been a lot of work to determine experts in CQA websites, make predictions about po-
tential experts and predicting how their answering behaviour varies over time. There may be a
situation where some experts were aggressive contributors to the community at some point in time.
But gradually their contributions started to diminish and they may also finally stop contributing in
future.
We have presented an approach to rank the experts in the community as a function of time. Exper-
tise score of an expert shows how good the expert is. Higher the expertise score, better expert the
person is. Our metrics to calculate the expertise score are modifications of the existing expertise
ranking metrics such that it incorporates durations of inactivity of the expert in the community
while ranking them
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