Critically Examining the "Neural Hype": Weak Baselines and the Additivity of Effectiveness Gains from Neural Ranking Models

Is neural IR mostly hype? In a recent SIGIR Forum article, Lin expressed skepticism that neural ranking models were actually improving ad hoc retrieval effectiveness in limited data scenarios. He provided anecdotal evidence that authors of neural IR papers demonstrate "wins" by comparing against weak baselines. This paper provides a rigorous evaluation of those claims in two ways: First, we conducted a meta-analysis of papers that have reported experimental results on the TREC Robust04 test collection. We do not find evidence of an upward trend in effectiveness over time. In fact, the best reported results are from a decade ago and no recent neural approach comes close. Second, we applied five recent neural models to rerank the strong baselines that Lin used to make his arguments. A significant improvement was observed for one of the models, demonstrating additivity in gains. While there appears to be merit to neural IR approaches, at least some of the gains reported in the literature appear illusory.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019

Soliton transverse instabilities in nonlocal nonlinear media

We analyze the transverse instabilities of spatial bright solitons in nonlocal nonlinear media, both analytically and numerically. We demonstrate that the nonlocal nonlinear response leads to a dramatic suppression of the transverse instability of the soliton stripes, and we derive the asymptotic expressions for the instability growth rate in both short- and long-wave approximations.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Development of Computer Vision-Enhanced Smart Golf Ball Retriever

An automatic vehicle system was developed to assist golfers in collecting golf balls from a practice field. Computer vision methodology was utilized to enhance the detection of golf balls in shallow and/or deep grass regions. The free software OpenCV was used in this project because of its powerful features and supported repository. The homemade golf ball picker was built with a smart recognition function for golf balls and can lock onto targets by itself. A set of field tests was completed in which the rate of golf ball recognition was as high as 95%. We report that this homemade smart golf ball picker can reduce the tremendous amount of labor associated with having to gather golf balls scattered throughout a practice field

WERE U.S. CROP YIELDS RANDOM IN RECENT YEARS?

Crop Production/Industries,

K-quantum Nonlinear Jaynes-Cummings Model in Two Trapped Ions

A k-quantum nonlinear Jaynes-Cummings model for two trapped ions interacting with laser beams resonant to k-th red side-band of center-of-mass mode, far from Lamb-Dicke regime, has been obtained. The exact analytic solution showed the existence of quantum collapses and revivals of the occupation of two atoms.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Degeneracy of Landau Level and Quantum Group SL_q(2)

We show that there is a kind of quantum group symmetry $sl_{q}(2)$ in the usual Landau problem and it is this quantum group symmetry that governs the degeneracy of Landau levels. We find that under the periodic boundary condition, the degree of degeneracy of Landau levels is finite, and it just equals the dimension of the irreducible cyclic representation of the quantum group $sl_{q}(2)$.Comment: 10 pages, Preprint ( reprint ) of Nankai Institute of Mathematics. For hard copy, write to Prof. Mo-lin GE, Director of Nankai Institute of Mathematics. Do not send emails to this computer accoun