Empowering Dual-Encoder with Query Generator for Cross-Lingual Dense Retrieval

In monolingual dense retrieval, lots of works focus on how to distill knowledge from cross-encoder re-ranker to dual-encoder retriever and these methods achieve better performance due to the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-ranker. However, we find that the performance of the cross-encoder re-ranker is heavily influenced by the number of training samples and the quality of negative samples, which is hard to obtain in the cross-lingual setting. In this paper, we propose to use a query generator as the teacher in the cross-lingual setting, which is less dependent on enough training samples and high-quality negative samples. In addition to traditional knowledge distillation, we further propose a novel enhancement method, which uses the query generator to help the dual-encoder align queries from different languages, but does not need any additional parallel sentences. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.Comment: EMNLP 2022 main conferenc

RUEL: Retrieval-Augmented User Representation with Edge Browser Logs for Sequential Recommendation

Online recommender systems (RS) aim to match user needs with the vast amount of resources available on various platforms. A key challenge is to model user preferences accurately under the condition of data sparsity. To address this challenge, some methods have leveraged external user behavior data from multiple platforms to enrich user representation. However, all of these methods require a consistent user ID across platforms and ignore the information from similar users. In this study, we propose RUEL, a novel retrieval-based sequential recommender that can effectively incorporate external anonymous user behavior data from Edge browser logs to enhance recommendation. We first collect and preprocess a large volume of Edge browser logs over a one-year period and link them to target entities that correspond to candidate items in recommendation datasets. We then design a contrastive learning framework with a momentum encoder and a memory bank to retrieve the most relevant and diverse browsing sequences from the full browsing log based on the semantic similarity between user representations. After retrieval, we apply an item-level attentive selector to filter out noisy items and generate refined sequence embeddings for the final predictor. RUEL is the first method that connects user browsing data with typical recommendation datasets and can be generalized to various recommendation scenarios and datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on four real datasets for sequential recommendation tasks and demonstrate that RUEL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We also conduct ablation studies and qualitative analysis to validate the effectiveness of each component of RUEL and provide additional insights into our method.Comment: CIKM 2023 AD

Large Language Models are Diverse Role-Players for Summarization Evaluation

Text summarization has a wide range of applications in many scenarios. The evaluation of the quality of the generated text is a complex problem. A big challenge to language evaluation is that there is a clear divergence between existing metrics and human evaluation. For example, the quality of a document summary can be measured by human annotators from both objective aspects, such as grammatical and semantic correctness, as well as subjective dimensions, such as comprehensiveness, succinctness, and interestingness. Most of the automatic evaluation methods like BLUE/ROUGE may be not able to capture the above dimensions well. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation framework based on LLMs, which provides a comprehensive evaluation framework by comparing generated text and reference text from both objective and subjective aspects. First, we propose to model objective and subjective dimensions of generated text based on roleplayers prompting mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a context-based prompting mechanism that is able to generate dynamic roleplayer profiles based on input context. Finally, we design a multi-roleplayer prompting technology based on batch prompting to integrate multiple evaluation results into evaluation results. Experimental results on two real datasets for summarization show that our model is highly competitive and has a very high consistency with human annotators