165 research outputs found
ANTIQUE: A Non-Factoid Question Answering Benchmark
Considering the widespread use of mobile and voice search, answer passage
retrieval for non-factoid questions plays a critical role in modern information
retrieval systems. Despite the importance of the task, the community still
feels the significant lack of large-scale non-factoid question answering
collections with real questions and comprehensive relevance judgments. In this
paper, we develop and release a collection of 2,626 open-domain non-factoid
questions from a diverse set of categories. The dataset, called ANTIQUE,
contains 34,011 manual relevance annotations. The questions were asked by real
users in a community question answering service, i.e., Yahoo! Answers.
Relevance judgments for all the answers to each question were collected through
crowdsourcing. To facilitate further research, we also include a brief analysis
of the data as well as baseline results on both classical and recently
developed neural IR models
Target Apps Selection: Towards a Unified Search Framework for Mobile Devices
With the recent growth of conversational systems and intelligent assistants
such as Apple Siri and Google Assistant, mobile devices are becoming even more
pervasive in our lives. As a consequence, users are getting engaged with the
mobile apps and frequently search for an information need in their apps.
However, users cannot search within their apps through their intelligent
assistants. This requires a unified mobile search framework that identifies the
target app(s) for the user's query, submits the query to the app(s), and
presents the results to the user. In this paper, we take the first step forward
towards developing unified mobile search. In more detail, we introduce and
study the task of target apps selection, which has various potential real-world
applications. To this aim, we analyze attributes of search queries as well as
user behaviors, while searching with different mobile apps. The analyses are
done based on thousands of queries that we collected through crowdsourcing. We
finally study the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models for this
task and propose two simple yet effective neural models that significantly
outperform the baselines. Our neural approaches are based on learning
high-dimensional representations for mobile apps. Our analyses and experiments
suggest specific future directions in this research area.Comment: To appear at SIGIR 201
Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years,
thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which
nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip.
While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these
huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In
particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation
strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or
content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener
needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and
related publications quite sparse.
The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify
and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research
is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of
the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second,
we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further
evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving
the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and
providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet
under-researched, directions in the field
Pre-Training Multi-Modal Dense Retrievers for Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering
This paper studies a category of visual question answering tasks, in which
accessing external knowledge is necessary for answering the questions. This
category is called outside-knowledge visual question answering (OK-VQA). A
major step in developing OK-VQA systems is to retrieve relevant documents for
the given multi-modal query. Current state-of-the-art asymmetric dense
retrieval model for this task uses an architecture with a multi-modal query
encoder and a uni-modal document encoder. Such an architecture requires a large
amount of training data for effective performance. We propose an automatic data
generation pipeline for pre-training passage retrieval models for OK-VQA tasks.
The proposed approach leads to 26.9% Precision@5 improvements compared to the
current state-of-the-art asymmetric architecture. Additionally, the proposed
pre-training approach exhibits a good ability in zero-shot retrieval scenarios
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