Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) is a ubiquitous task in machine learning applications such as recommendation systems. Given a query vector and $n$ atom vectors in $d$-dimensional space, the goal of MIPS is to find the atom that has the highest inner product with the query vector. Existing MIPS algorithms scale at least as $O(\sqrt{d})$, which becomes computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional settings. In this work, we present BanditMIPS, a novel randomized MIPS algorithm whose complexity is independent of $d$. BanditMIPS estimates the inner product for each atom by subsampling coordinates and adaptively evaluates more coordinates for more promising atoms. The specific adaptive sampling strategy is motivated by multi-armed bandits. We provide theoretical guarantees that BanditMIPS returns the correct answer with high probability, while improving the complexity in $d$ from $O(\sqrt{d})$ to $O(1)$. We also perform experiments on four synthetic and real-world datasets and demonstrate that BanditMIPS outperforms prior state-of-the-art algorithms. For example, in the Movie Lens dataset ($n$=4,000, $d$=6,000), BanditMIPS is 20$\times$ faster than the next best algorithm while returning the same answer. BanditMIPS requires no preprocessing of the data and includes a hyperparameter that practitioners may use to trade off accuracy and runtime. We also propose a variant of our algorithm, named BanditMIPS-$\alpha$, which achieves further speedups by employing non-uniform sampling across coordinates. Finally, we demonstrate how known preprocessing techniques can be used to further accelerate BanditMIPS, and discuss applications to Matching Pursuit and Fourier analysis.

Terminology sources, such as controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems, play a key role in digitizing cultural heritage. However, Information Retrieval (IR) systems that allow to query and explore these lexical resources often lack an adequate representation of the semantics behind the user's search, which can be conveyed through multiple expression modalities (e.g., images, keywords or textual descriptions). This paper presents the implementation of a new search engine for one of the most widely used iconography classification system, Iconclass. The novelty of this system is the use of a pre-trained vision-language model, namely CLIP, to retrieve and explore Iconclass concepts using visual or textual queries.

The goal of entity resolution is to identify records in multiple datasets that represent the same real-world entity. However, comparing all records across datasets can be computationally intensive, leading to long runtimes. To reduce these runtimes, entity resolution pipelines are constructed of two parts: a blocker that applies a computationally cheap method to select candidate record pairs, and a matcher that afterwards identifies matching pairs from this set using more expensive methods. This paper presents SC-Block, a blocking method that utilizes supervised contrastive learning for positioning records in the embedding space, and nearest neighbour search for candidate set building. We benchmark SC-Block against eight state-of-the-art blocking methods. In order to relate the training time of SC-Block to the reduction of the overall runtime of the entity resolution pipeline, we combine SC-Block with four matching methods into complete pipelines. For measuring the overall runtime, we determine candidate sets with 99.5% pair completeness and pass them to the matcher. The results show that SC-Block is able to create smaller candidate sets and pipelines with SC-Block execute 1.5 to 2 times faster compared to pipelines with other blockers, without sacrificing F1 score. Blockers are often evaluated using relatively small datasets which might lead to runtime effects resulting from a large vocabulary size being overlooked. In order to measure runtimes in a more challenging setting, we introduce a new benchmark dataset that requires large numbers of product offers to be blocked. On this large-scale benchmark dataset, pipelines utilizing SC-Block and the best-performing matcher execute 8 times faster than pipelines utilizing another blocker with the same matcher reducing the runtime from 2.5 hours to 18 minutes, clearly compensating for the 5 minutes required for training SC-Block.

Due to the usefulness in data enrichment for data analysis tasks, joinable table discovery has become an important operation in data lake management. Existing approaches target equi-joins, the most common way of combining tables for creating a unified view, or semantic joins, which tolerate misspellings and different formats to deliver more join results. They are either exact solutions whose running time is linear in the sizes of query column and target table repository or approximate solutions lacking precision. In this paper, we propose Deepjoin, a deep learning model for accurate and efficient joinable table discovery. Our solution is an embedding-based retrieval, which employs a pre-trained language model (PLM) and is designed as one framework serving both equi- and semantic joins. We propose a set of contextualization options to transform column contents to a text sequence. The PLM reads the sequence and is fine-tuned to embed columns to vectors such that columns are expected to be joinable if they are close to each other in the vector space. Since the output of the PLM is fixed in length, the subsequent search procedure becomes independent of the column size. With a state-of-the-art approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm, the search time is logarithmic in the repository size. To train the model, we devise the techniques for preparing training data as well as data augmentation. The experiments on real datasets demonstrate that by training on a small subset of a corpus, Deepjoin generalizes to large datasets and its precision consistently outperforms other approximate solutions'. Deepjoin is even more accurate than an exact solution to semantic joins when evaluated with labels from experts. Moreover, when equipped with a GPU, Deepjoin is up to two orders of magnitude faster than existing solutions.

In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous search and vessel detection in an unknown GNSS-denied maritime environment with fixed-wing UAVs. The main challenge in such environments with limited localization, communication range, and the total number of UAVs and sensors is to implement an appropriate search strategy so that a target vessel can be detected as soon as possible. Thus we present informed and non-informed methods used to search the environment. The informed method relies on an obtained probabilistic map, while the non-informed method navigates the UAVs along predefined paths computed with respect to the environment. The vessel detection method is trained on synthetic data collected in the simulator with data annotation tools. Comparative experiments in simulation have shown that our combination of sensors, search methods and a vessel detection algorithm leads to a successful search for the target vessel in such challenging environments.

Recently, we have witnessed generative retrieval increasingly gaining attention in the information retrieval (IR) field, which retrieves documents by directly generating their identifiers. So far, much effort has been devoted to developing effective generative retrieval models. There has been less attention paid to the robustness perspective. When a new retrieval paradigm enters into the real-world application, it is also critical to measure the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, i.e., how would generative retrieval models generalize to new distributions. To answer this question, firstly, we define OOD robustness from three perspectives in retrieval problems: 1) The query variations; 2) The unforeseen query types; and 3) The unforeseen tasks. Based on this taxonomy, we conduct empirical studies to analyze the OOD robustness of several representative generative retrieval models against dense retrieval models. The empirical results indicate that the OOD robustness of generative retrieval models requires enhancement. We hope studying the OOD robustness of generative retrieval models would be advantageous to the IR community.

Named entity recognition (NER) is used to extract information from various documents and texts such as names and dates. It is important to extract education and work experience information from resumes in order to filter them. Considering the fact that all information in a resume has to be entered to the companys system manually, automatizing this process will save time of the companies. In this study, a deep learning-based semi-automatic named entity recognition system has been implemented with a focus on resumes in the field of IT. Firstly, resumes of employees from five different IT related fields has been annotated. Six transformer based pre-trained models have been adapted to named entity recognition problem using the annotated data. These models have been selected among popular models in the natural language processing field. The obtained system can recognize eight different entity types which are city, date, degree, diploma major, job title, language, country and skill. Models used in the experiments are compared using micro, macro and weighted F1 scores and the performance of the methods was evaluated. Taking these scores into account for test set the best micro and weighted F1 score is obtained by RoBERTa and the best macro F1 score is obtained by Electra model.

We introduce and define the novel problem of multi-distribution information retrieval (IR) where given a query, systems need to retrieve passages from within multiple collections, each drawn from a different distribution. Some of these collections and distributions might not be available at training time. To evaluate methods for multi-distribution retrieval, we design three benchmarks for this task from existing single-distribution datasets, namely, a dataset based on question answering and two based on entity matching. We propose simple methods for this task which allocate the fixed retrieval budget (top-k passages) strategically across domains to prevent the known domains from consuming most of the budget. We show that our methods lead to an average of 3.8+ and up to 8.0 points improvements in Recall@100 across the datasets and that improvements are consistent when fine-tuning different base retrieval models. Our benchmarks are made publicly available.

This presentation focuses on the importance of web crawling and page ranking algorithms in dealing with the massive amount of data present on the World Wide Web. As the web continues to grow exponentially, efficient search and retrieval methods become crucial. Web crawling is a process that converts unstructured data into structured data, enabling effective information retrieval. Additionally, page ranking algorithms play a significant role in assessing the quality and popularity of web pages. The presentation explores the background of these algorithms and evaluates five different crawling algorithms: Shark Search, Priority-Based Queue, Naive Bayes, Breadth-First, and Depth-First. The goal is to identify the most effective algorithm for crawling web pages. By understanding these algorithms, we can enhance our ability to navigate the web and extract valuable information efficiently.

Rankings on online platforms help their end-users find the relevant information -- people, news, media, and products -- quickly. Fair ranking tasks, which ask to rank a set of items to maximize utility subject to satisfying group-fairness constraints, have gained significant interest in the Algorithmic Fairness, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning literature. Recent works, however, identify uncertainty in the utilities of items as a primary cause of unfairness and propose introducing randomness in the output. This randomness is carefully chosen to guarantee an adequate representation of each item (while accounting for the uncertainty). However, due to this randomness, the output rankings may violate group fairness constraints. We give an efficient algorithm that samples rankings from an individually-fair distribution while ensuring that every output ranking is group fair. The expected utility of the output ranking is at least $\alpha$ times the utility of the optimal fair solution. Here, $\alpha$ depends on the utilities, position-discounts, and constraints -- it approaches 1 as the range of utilities or the position-discounts shrinks, or when utilities satisfy distributional assumptions. Empirically, we observe that our algorithm achieves individual and group fairness and that Pareto dominates the state-of-the-art baselines.