We study the problem of query attribute value extraction, which aims to identify named entities from user queries as diverse surface form attribute values and afterward transform them into formally canonical forms. Such a problem consists of two phases: {named entity recognition (NER)} and {attribute value normalization (AVN)}. However, existing works only focus on the NER phase but neglect equally important AVN. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a unified query attribute value extraction system in e-commerce search named QUEACO, which involves both two phases. Moreover, by leveraging large-scale weakly-labeled behavior data, we further improve the extraction performance with less supervision cost. Specifically, for the NER phase, QUEACO adopts a novel teacher-student network, where a teacher network that is trained on the strongly-labeled data generates pseudo-labels to refine the weakly-labeled data for training a student network. Meanwhile, the teacher network can be dynamically adapted by the feedback of the student's performance on strongly-labeled data to maximally denoise the noisy supervisions from the weak labels. For the AVN phase, we also leverage the weakly-labeled query-to-attribute behavior data to normalize surface form attribute values from queries into canonical forms from products. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale E-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of QUEACO.

With the introduction of the serverless SQL pool as a part of Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft has provided a very cost-efficient and convenient way to drive value from data residing in lakes using simple T-SQL statements. It enables you to easily build logical analytical models by querying and joining data across heterogeneous sources making the development of complex data integration pipelines obsolete in many cases. To use it, you don't even need to explicitly provision it beforehand due to its serverless nature, it is per default part of an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace. All you have to do is query data in an on-demand fashion in which you get charged according to the amount of data your queries need to process. Yet, the flexibility provided in terms of how data can be stored and queried require you to stick to some conventions for properly applying all its features and functionalities. Otherwise, the once promising serverless query engine can end up causing lots of costs together with a poor performance.

The ubiquitous availability of computing devices and the widespread use of the internet have generated a large amount of data continuously. Therefore, the amount of available information on any given topic is far beyond humans' processing capacity to properly process, causing what is known as information overload. To efficiently cope with large amounts of information and generate content with significant value to users, we require identifying, merging and summarising information. Data summaries can help gather related information and collect it into a shorter format that enables answering complicated questions, gaining new insight and discovering conceptual boundaries. This thesis focuses on three main challenges to alleviate information overload using novel summarisation techniques. It further intends to facilitate the analysis of documents to support personalised information extraction. This thesis separates the research issues into four areas, covering (i) feature engineering in document summarisation, (ii) traditional static and inflexible summaries, (iii) traditional generic summarisation approaches, and (iv) the need for reference summaries. We propose novel approaches to tackle these challenges, by: i)enabling automatic intelligent feature engineering, ii) enabling flexible and interactive summarisation, iii) utilising intelligent and personalised summarisation approaches. The experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed approaches compared to other state-of-the-art models. We further propose solutions to the information overload problem in different domains through summarisation, covering network traffic data, health data and business process data.

Tech giants are investing heavily in machine learning. In 2019, Microsoft invested in 11 artificial intelligence (AI) startups, with $1 billion for OpenAI alone. In that same year, Intel Capital made 19 investments, and Google Ventures made 16 investments. That huge influx of capital means that AI computing power is making rapid advancements in a range of sectors from healthcare to construction to marketing and search engine optimization. However, before we get into the implications of machine learning for SEO professionals, let's define what we mean by AI.

To implement a good Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system, it is essential to adopt efficient search methods. One way to achieve this results is by exploiting approximate search techniques. In fact, when we deal with very large collections of data, using an exact search method makes the system very slow. In this project, we adopt the Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) index to implement a CBIR system that allows us to perform fast similarity search on deep features. Specifically, we exploit transfer learning techniques to extract deep features from images; this phase is done using two famous Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as features extractors: Resnet50 and Resnet50v2, both pre-trained on ImageNet. Then we try out several fully connected deep neural networks, built on top of both of the previously mentioned CNNs in order to fine-tuned them on our dataset. In both of previous cases, we index the features within our LSH index implementation and within a sequential scan, to better understand how much the introduction of the index affects the results. Finally, we carry out a performance analysis: we evaluate the relevance of the result set, computing the mAP (mean Average Precision) value obtained during the different experiments with respect to the number of done comparison and varying the hyper-parameter values of the LSH index.

AI-CAD marked axillary lymph node and region in right upper outer quadrant (arrows and thin line outlining both sites) and assigned an abnormality score of 28%. August 11, 2021 -- According to an open-access Editor's Choice article in the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), artificial intelligence-based computer-aided detection (AI-CAD) can be a practical addition for lowering false-positive findings when performing post-breast conserving therapy (BCT) surveillance mammography. "After BCT, adjunct digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) or AI-CAD reduced recall rates and improved accuracy in the ipsilateral and contralateral breasts compared with digital mammography (DM)," wrote lead investigator Jung Hyun Yoon. "In the ipsilateral breast, addition of AI-CAD resulted in lower recall rate and higher accuracy than addition of DBT." Yoon and colleagues' single-center retrospective study included 314 women (mean age, 53.2 years; 4 with bilateral breast cancer) who underwent BCT followed by DBT (mean interval from surgery to DBT, 15.2 months). Three breast radiologists independently reviewed images in three sessions: DM, DM with DBT, and DM with AI-CAD.

Ranking models have achieved promising results, but it remains challenging to design personalized ranking systems to leverage user profiles and semantic representations between queries and documents. In this paper, we propose a topic-based personalized ranking model (TPRM) that integrates user topical profile with pretrained contextualized term representations to tailor the general document ranking list. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate that TPRM outperforms state-of-the-art ad-hoc ranking models and personalized ranking models significantly. Keywords: personalized ranking model · personalized search · topic model · user profile.

Query expansion with pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is a powerful approach to enhance the effectiveness in information retrieval. Recently, with the rapid advance of deep learning techniques, neural text generation has achieved promising success in many natural language tasks. To leverage the strength of text generation for information retrieval, in this article, we propose a novel approach which effectively integrates text generation models into PRF-based query expansion. In particular, our approach generates augmented query terms via neural text generation models conditioned on both the initial query and pseudo-relevance feedback. Moreover, in order to train the generative model, we adopt the conditional generative adversarial nets (CGANs) and propose the PRF-CGAN method in which both the generator and the discriminator are conditioned on the pseudo-relevance feedback. We evaluate the performance of our approach on information retrieval tasks using two benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our approach achieves comparable performance or outperforms traditional query expansion methods on both the retrieval and reranking tasks.

In the age of big data, data processing and analytics are fundamental, ubiquitous, and crucial to many organizations which undertake a digitalization journey to improve and transform their businesses and operations. Data analytics typically entails other key operations such as data acquisition, data cleansing, data integration, modeling, etc., before insights could be extracted. Big data can unleash significant value creation across many sectors such as health care and retail[56]. However, the complexity of data (e.g., high volume, high velocity, and high variety) presents many challenges in data analytics and hence renders the difficulty in drawing meaningful insights. To tackle the challenge and facilitate the data processing and analytics efficiently and effectively, a lot of algorithms and techniques have been designed and numerous learning systems have also been developed by researchers and practitioners such as Spark MLlib[63], and Rafiki[104]. To support fast data processing and accurate data analytics, a huge number of algorithms rely on rules that are developed based on human knowledge and experience. For example, Shortest-job-first is a scheduling algorithm that chooses the job with the smallest execution time for the next execution. However, without fully exploiting characteristics of the workload, it can achieve inferior performance compared to DRL-based scheduling algorithm [58].

Transformers have improved the state-of-the-art across numerous tasks in sequence modeling. Besides the quadratic computational and memory complexity w.r.t the sequence length, the self-attention mechanism only processes information at the same scale, i.e., all attention heads are in the same resolution, resulting in the limited power of the Transformer. To remedy this, we propose a novel and efficient structure named Adaptive Multi-Resolution Attention (AdaMRA for short), which scales linearly to sequence length in terms of time and space. Specifically, we leverage a multi-resolution multi-head attention mechanism, enabling attention heads to capture long-range contextual information in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Moreover, to capture the potential relations between query representation and clues of different attention granularities, we leave the decision of which resolution of attention to use to query, which further improves the model's capacity compared to vanilla Transformer. In an effort to reduce complexity, we adopt kernel attention without degrading the performance. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our model by achieving a state-of-the-art performance-efficiency-memory trade-off. To facilitate AdaMRA utilization by the scientific community, the code implementation will be made publicly available.