Recently, contrastive learning has become a key component in fine-tuning code search models for software development efficiency and effectiveness. It pulls together positive code snippets while pushing negative samples away given search queries. Among contrastive learning, InfoNCE is the most widely used loss function due to its better performance. However, the following problems in negative samples of InfoNCE may deteriorate its representation learning: 1) The existence of false negative samples in large code corpora due to duplications. 2). The failure to explicitly differentiate between the potential relevance of negative samples. As an example, a bubble sorting algorithm example is less ``negative'' than a file saving function for the quick sorting algorithm query. In this paper, we tackle the above problems by proposing a simple yet effective Soft-InfoNCE loss that inserts weight terms into InfoNCE. In our proposed loss function, we apply three methods to estimate the weights of negative pairs and show that the vanilla InfoNCE loss is a special case of Soft-InfoNCE. Theoretically, we analyze the effects of Soft-InfoNCE on controlling the distribution of learnt code representations and on deducing a more precise mutual information estimation. We furthermore discuss the superiority of proposed loss functions with other design alternatives. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Soft-InfoNCE and weights estimation methods under state-of-the-art code search models on a large-scale public dataset consisting of six programming languages. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Alex-HaochenLi/Soft-InfoNCE}.

This paper introduces a simple yet effective query expansion approach, denoted as query2doc, to improve both sparse and dense retrieval systems. The proposed method first generates pseudo-documents by few-shot prompting large language models (LLMs), and then expands the query with generated pseudo-documents. LLMs are trained on web-scale text corpora and are adept at knowledge memorization. The pseudo-documents from LLMs often contain highly relevant information that can aid in query disambiguation and guide the retrievers. Experimental results demonstrate that query2doc boosts the performance of BM25 by 3% to 15% on ad-hoc IR datasets, such as MS-MARCO and TREC DL, without any model fine-tuning. Furthermore, our method also benefits state-of-the-art dense retrievers in terms of both in-domain and out-of-domain results.

The exponential growth in scholarly publications necessitates advanced tools for efficient article retrieval, especially in interdisciplinary fields where diverse terminologies are used to describe similar research. Traditional keyword-based search engines often fall short in assisting users who may not be familiar with specific terminologies. To address this, we present a knowledge graph-based paper search engine for biomedical research to enhance the user experience in discovering relevant queries and articles. The system, dubbed DiscoverPath, employs Named Entity Recognition (NER) and part-of-speech (POS) tagging to extract terminologies and relationships from article abstracts to create a KG. To reduce information overload, DiscoverPath presents users with a focused subgraph containing the queried entity and its neighboring nodes and incorporates a query recommendation system, enabling users to iteratively refine their queries. The system is equipped with an accessible Graphical User Interface that provides an intuitive visualization of the KG, query recommendations, and detailed article information, enabling efficient article retrieval, thus fostering interdisciplinary knowledge exploration. DiscoverPath is open-sourced at https://github.com/ynchuang/DiscoverPath.

Question answering over RDF data like knowledge graphs has been greatly advanced, with a number of good systems providing crisp answers for natural language questions or telegraphic queries. Some of these systems incorporate textual sources as additional evidence for the answering process, but cannot compute answers that are present in text alone. Conversely, the IR and NLP communities have addressed QA over text, but such systems barely utilize semantic data and knowledge. This paper presents a method for complex questions that can seamlessly operate over a mixture of RDF datasets and text corpora, or individual sources, in a unified framework. Our method, called UNIQORN, builds a context graph on-the-fly, by retrieving question-relevant evidences from the RDF data and/or a text corpus, using fine-tuned BERT models. The resulting graph typically contains all question-relevant evidences but also a lot of noise. UNIQORN copes with this input by a graph algorithm for Group Steiner Trees, that identifies the best answer candidates in the context graph. Experimental results on several benchmarks of complex questions with multiple entities and relations, show that UNIQORN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for heterogeneous QA -- in a full training mode, as well as in zero-shot settings. The graph-based methodology provides user-interpretable evidence for the complete answering process.

How much private information do text embeddings reveal about the original text? We investigate the problem of embedding \textit{inversion}, reconstructing the full text represented in dense text embeddings. We frame the problem as controlled generation: generating text that, when reembedded, is close to a fixed point in latent space. We find that although a na\"ive model conditioned on the embedding performs poorly, a multi-step method that iteratively corrects and re-embeds text is able to recover $92\%$ of $32\text{-token}$ text inputs exactly. We train our model to decode text embeddings from two state-of-the-art embedding models, and also show that our model can recover important personal information (full names) from a dataset of clinical notes. Our code is available on Github: \href{https://github.com/jxmorris12/vec2text}{github.com/jxmorris12/vec2text}.

Automatic crash bucketing is a crucial phase in the software development process for efficiently triaging bug reports. It generally consists in grouping similar reports through clustering techniques. However, with real-time streaming bug collection, systems are needed to quickly answer the question: What are the most similar bugs to a new one?, that is, efficiently find near-duplicates. It is thus natural to consider nearest neighbors search to tackle this problem and especially the well-known locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) to deal with large datasets due to its sublinear performance and theoretical guarantees on the similarity search accuracy. Surprisingly, LSH has not been considered in the crash bucketing literature. It is indeed not trivial to derive hash functions that satisfy the so-called locality-sensitive property for the most advanced crash bucketing metrics. Consequently, we study in this paper how to leverage LSH for this task. To be able to consider the most relevant metrics used in the literature, we introduce DeepLSH, a Siamese DNN architecture with an original loss function, that perfectly approximates the locality-sensitivity property even for Jaccard and Cosine metrics for which exact LSH solutions exist. We support this claim with a series of experiments on an original dataset, which we make available.

Multimodal information extraction is attracting research attention nowadays, which requires aggregating representations from different modalities. In this paper, we present the Intra- and Inter-Sample Relationship Modeling (I2SRM) method for this task, which contains two modules. Firstly, the intra-sample relationship modeling module operates on a single sample and aims to learn effective representations. Embeddings from textual and visual modalities are shifted to bridge the modality gap caused by distinct pre-trained language and image models. Secondly, the inter-sample relationship modeling module considers relationships among multiple samples and focuses on capturing the interactions. An AttnMixup strategy is proposed, which not only enables collaboration among samples but also augments data to improve generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on the multimodal named entity recognition datasets Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017, and the multimodal relation extraction dataset MNRE. Our proposed method I2SRM achieves competitive results, 77.12% F1-score on Twitter-2015, 88.40% F1-score on Twitter-2017, and 84.12% F1-score on MNRE.

In many NLP applications that involve interpreting sentences within a rich context -- for instance, information retrieval systems or dialogue systems -- it is desirable to be able to preserve the sentence in a form that can be readily understood without context, for later reuse -- a process known as ``decontextualization''. While previous work demonstrated that generative Seq2Seq models could effectively perform decontextualization after being fine-tuned on a specific dataset, this approach requires expensive human annotations and may not transfer to other domains. We propose a few-shot method of decontextualization using a large language model, and present preliminary results showing that this method achieves viable performance on multiple domains using only a small set of examples.

Human trafficking (HT) is a pervasive global issue affecting vulnerable individuals, violating their fundamental human rights. Investigations reveal that a significant number of HT cases are associated with online advertisements (ads), particularly in escort markets. Consequently, identifying and connecting HT vendors has become increasingly challenging for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). To address this issue, we introduce IDTraffickers, an extensive dataset consisting of 87,595 text ads and 5,244 vendor labels to enable the verification and identification of potential HT vendors on online escort markets. To establish a benchmark for authorship identification, we train a DeCLUTR-small model, achieving a macro-F1 score of 0.8656 in a closed-set classification environment. Next, we leverage the style representations extracted from the trained classifier to conduct authorship verification, resulting in a mean r-precision score of 0.8852 in an open-set ranking environment. Finally, to encourage further research and ensure responsible data sharing, we plan to release IDTraffickers for the authorship attribution task to researchers under specific conditions, considering the sensitive nature of the data. We believe that the availability of our dataset and benchmarks will empower future researchers to utilize our findings, thereby facilitating the effective linkage of escort ads and the development of more robust approaches for identifying HT indicators.

Efficiently finding doctors and locations is an important search problem for patients in the healthcare domain, for which traditional information retrieval methods tend not to work optimally. In the last ten years, knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a powerful way to combine the benefits of gleaning insights from semi-structured data using semantic modeling, natural language processing techniques like information extraction, and robust querying using structured query languages like SPARQL and Cypher. In this short paper, we present a KG-based search engine architecture for robustly finding doctors and locations in the healthcare domain. Early results demonstrate that our approach can lead to significantly higher coverage for complex queries without degrading quality.