Query expansion is a commonly-used technique in many search systems to better represent users' information needs with additional query terms. Existing studies for this task usually propose to expand a query with retrieved or generated contextual documents. However, both types of methods have clear limitations. For retrieval-based methods, the documents retrieved with the original query might not be accurate enough to reveal the search intent, especially when the query is brief or ambiguous. For generation-based methods, existing models can hardly be trained or aligned on a particular corpus, due to the lack of corpus-specific labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Large Language Model (LLM) based mutual verification framework for query expansion, which alleviates the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation pipeline, which can effectively leverage the contextual knowledge encoded in LLMs to generate sub-queries and corresponding documents from multiple perspectives. Next, we employ a mutual verification method for both generated and retrieved contextual documents, where 1) retrieved documents are filtered with the external contextual knowledge in generated documents, and 2) generated documents are filtered with the corpus-specific knowledge in retrieved documents. Overall, the proposed method allows retrieved and generated documents to complement each other to finalize a better query expansion. We conduct extensive experiments on three information retrieval datasets, i.e., TREC-DL-2020, TREC-COVID, and MSMARCO. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms other baselines significantly.

Objective: Our study aimed to construct an exhaustive Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) Lexicon (CIHLex) to better represent the often underrepresented physical and psychological CIH approaches in standard terminologies. We also intended to apply advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and GPT-3.5 Turbo for CIH named entity recognition, evaluating their performance against established models like MetaMap and CLAMP. Materials and Methods: We constructed the CIHLex by integrating various resources, compiling and integrating data from biomedical literature and relevant knowledge bases. The Lexicon encompasses 198 unique concepts with 1090 corresponding unique terms. We matched these concepts to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Additionally, we developed and utilized BERT models and compared their efficiency in CIH named entity recognition to that of other models such as MetaMap, CLAMP, and GPT3.5-turbo. Results: From the 198 unique concepts in CIHLex, 62.1% could be matched to at least one term in the UMLS. Moreover, 75.7% of the mapped UMLS Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) were categorized as "Therapeutic or Preventive Procedure." Among the models applied to CIH named entity recognition, BLUEBERT delivered the highest macro average F1-score of 0.90, surpassing other models. Conclusion: Our CIHLex significantly augments representation of CIH approaches in biomedical literature. Demonstrating the utility of advanced NLP models, BERT notably excelled in CIH entity recognition. These results highlight promising strategies for enhancing standardization and recognition of CIH terminology in biomedical contexts.

Learned representations of scientific documents can serve as valuable input features for downstream tasks without further fine-tuning. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating these representations fail to capture the diversity of relevant tasks. In response, we introduce SciRepEval, the first comprehensive benchmark for training and evaluating scientific document representations. It includes 24 challenging and realistic tasks, 8 of which are new, across four formats: classification, regression, ranking and search. We then use this benchmark to study and improve the generalization ability of scientific document representation models. We show how state-of-the-art models like SPECTER and SciNCL struggle to generalize across the task formats, and that simple multi-task training fails to improve them. However, a new approach that learns multiple embeddings per document, each tailored to a different format, can improve performance. We experiment with task-format-specific control codes and adapters and find they outperform the existing single-embedding state-of-the-art by over 2 points absolute. We release the resulting family of multi-format models, called SPECTER2, for the community to use and build on.

With the exponential growth in large language models (LLMs), leveraging their emergent properties for specialized domains like finance merits exploration. However, regulated fields such as finance pose unique constraints, requiring domain-optimized frameworks. We present ConFIRM, an LLM-based conversational financial information retrieval model tailored for query intent classification and knowledge base labeling. ConFIRM comprises two modules: 1) a method to synthesize finance domain-specific question-answer pairs, and 2) evaluation of parameter efficient fine-tuning approaches for the query classification task. We generate a dataset of over 4000 samples, assessing accuracy on a separate test set. ConFIRM achieved over 90% accuracy, essential for regulatory compliance. ConFIRM provides a data-efficient solution to extract precise query intent for financial dialog systems.

In data-driven systems, data exploration is imperative for making real-time decisions. However, big data is stored in massive databases that are difficult to retrieve. Approximate Query Processing (AQP) is a technique for providing approximate answers to aggregate queries based on a summary of the data (synopsis) that closely replicates the behavior of the actual data, which can be useful where an approximate answer to the queries would be acceptable in a fraction of the real execution time. This study explores the novel utilization of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the generation of tabular data that can be employed in AQP for synopsis construction. We thoroughly investigate the unique challenges posed by the synopsis construction process, including maintaining data distribution characteristics, handling bounded continuous and categorical data, and preserving semantic relationships and then introduce the advancement of tabular GAN architectures that overcome these challenges. Furthermore, we propose and validate a suite of statistical metrics tailored for assessing the reliability of the GAN-generated synopses. Our findings demonstrate that advanced GAN variations exhibit a promising capacity to generate high-fidelity synopses, potentially transforming the efficiency and effectiveness of AQP in data-driven systems.

This paper addresses the problem of selecting of a set of texts for annotation in text classification using retrieval methods when there are limits on the number of annotations due to constraints on human resources. An additional challenge addressed is dealing with binary categories that have a small number of positive instances, reflecting severe class imbalance. In our situation, where annotation occurs over a long time period, the selection of texts to be annotated can be made in batches, with previous annotations guiding the choice of the next set. To address these challenges, the paper proposes leveraging SHAP to construct a quality set of queries for Elasticsearch and semantic search, to try to identify optimal sets of texts for annotation that will help with class imbalance. The approach is tested on sets of cue texts describing possible future events, constructed by participants involved in studies aimed to help with the management of obesity and diabetes. We introduce an effective method for selecting a small set of texts for annotation and building high-quality classifiers. We integrate vector search, semantic search, and machine learning classifiers to yield a good solution. Our experiments demonstrate improved F1 scores for the minority classes in binary classification.

Existing datasets for automated fact-checking have substantial limitations, such as relying on artificial claims, lacking annotations for evidence and intermediate reasoning, or including evidence published after the claim. In this paper we introduce AVeriTeC, a new dataset of 4,568 real-world claims covering fact-checks by 50 different organizations. Each claim is annotated with question-answer pairs supported by evidence available online, as well as textual justifications explaining how the evidence combines to produce a verdict. Through a multi-round annotation process, we avoid common pitfalls including context dependence, evidence insufficiency, and temporal leakage, and reach a substantial inter-annotator agreement of $\kappa=0.619$ on verdicts. We develop a baseline as well as an evaluation scheme for verifying claims through several question-answering steps against the open web.

Recent advances in large language models have enabled the development of viable generative information retrieval systems. A generative retrieval system returns a grounded generated text in response to an information need instead of the traditional document ranking. Quantifying the utility of these types of responses is essential for evaluating generative retrieval systems. As the established evaluation methodology for ranking-based ad hoc retrieval may seem unsuitable for generative retrieval, new approaches for reliable, repeatable, and reproducible experimentation are required. In this paper, we survey the relevant information retrieval and natural language processing literature, identify search tasks and system architectures in generative retrieval, develop a corresponding user model, and study its operationalization. This theoretical analysis provides a foundation and new insights for the evaluation of generative ad hoc retrieval systems.

Modern agriculture faces grand challenges to meet increased demands for food, fuel, feed, and fiber with population growth under the constraints of climate change and dwindling natural resources. Data innovation is urgently required to secure and improve the productivity, sustainability, and resilience of our agroecosystems. As various sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) instrumentation become more available, affordable, reliable, and stable, it has become possible to conduct data collection, integration, and analysis at multiple temporal and spatial scales, in real-time, and with high resolutions. At the same time, the sheer amount of data poses a great challenge to data storage and analysis, and the \textit{de facto} data management and analysis practices adopted by scientists have become increasingly inefficient. Additionally, the data generated from different disciplines, such as genomics, phenomics, environment, agronomy, and socioeconomic, can be highly heterogeneous. That is, datasets across disciplines often do not share the same ontology, modality, or format. All of the above make it necessary to design a new data management infrastructure that implements the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). In this paper, we propose Agriculture Data Management and Analytics (ADMA), which satisfies the FAIR principles. Our new data management infrastructure is intelligent by supporting semantic data management across disciplines, interactive by providing various data management/analysis portals such as web GUI, command line, and API, scalable by utilizing the power of high-performance computing (HPC), extensible by allowing users to load their own data analysis tools, trackable by keeping track of different operations on each file, and open by using a rich set of mature open source technologies.

This paper outlines the performance evaluation of a system for adverse drug event normalization, developed by the Data Science for Digital Health (DS4DH) group for the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) 2023 shared task 5. Shared task 5 targeted the normalization of adverse drug event mentions in Twitter to standard concepts of the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities terminology. Our system hinges on a two-stage approach: BERT fine-tuning for entity recognition, followed by zero-shot normalization using sentence transformers and reciprocalrank fusion. The approach yielded a precision of 44.9%, recall of 40.5%, and an F1-score of 42.6%. It outperformed the median performance in shared task 5 by 10% and demonstrated the highest performance among all participants. These results substantiate the effectiveness of our approach and its potential application for adverse drug event normalization in the realm of social media text mining. Introduction This paper presents the work of our group - Data Science for Digital Health (DS4DH) - in the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) 2023 task 5.