Information Retrieval
Migratable AI: Personalizing Dialog Conversations with migration context
Tejwani, Ravi, Katz, Boris, Breazeal, Cynthia
The migration of conversational AI agents across different embodiments in order to maintain the continuity of the task has been recently explored to further improve user experience. However, these migratable agents lack contextual understanding of the user information and the migrated device during the dialog conversations with the user. This opens the question of how an agent might behave when migrated into an embodiment for contextually predicting the next utterance. We collected a dataset from the dialog conversations between crowdsourced workers with the migration context involving personal and non-personal utterances in different settings (public or private) of embodiment into which the agent migrated. We trained the generative and information retrieval models on the dataset using with and without migration context and report the results of both qualitative metrics and human evaluation. We believe that the migration dataset would be useful for training future migratable AI systems.
3Diligent Expands ProdEX and Shopsight Applications
Its Shopsight application provides users access to project opportunities from ProdEX and enables remote assessment, quoting, and project management. Both systems incorporate 3Diligent's Connect interface which enables customers and manufacturers to communicate directly using a secure online portal and Zoom video conferencing tools. Operating similarly to traditional search engine marketing, manufacturers can create text ads that will display based on a customer's material and technology requirements. However, unlike traditional search engines, Connect is driven by RFQ inputs rather than generic keyword searches. As a result, manufacturers can customize their bids and visibility on dimensions such as material, technology, and program size to drive higher ROI.
ColloQL: Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Over Search Queries
Radhakrishnan, Karthik, Srikantan, Arvind, Lin, Xi Victoria
Translating natural language utterances to executable queries is a helpful technique in making the vast amount of data stored in relational databases accessible to a wider range of non-tech-savvy end users. Prior work in this area has largely focused on textual input that is linguistically correct and semantically unambiguous. However, real-world user queries are often succinct, colloquial, and noisy, resembling the input of a search engine. In this work, we introduce data augmentation techniques and a sampling-based content-aware BERT model (ColloQL) to achieve robust text-to-SQL modeling over natural language search (NLS) questions. Due to the lack of evaluation data, we curate a new dataset of NLS questions and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. ColloQL's superior performance extends to well-formed text, achieving 84.9% (logical) and 90.7% (execution) accuracy on the WikiSQL dataset, making it, to the best of our knowledge, the highest performing model that does not use execution guided decoding.
DIME: An Online Tool for the Visual Comparison of Cross-Modal Retrieval Models
Zhao, Tony, Choi, Jaeyoung, Friedland, Gerald
Cross-modal retrieval relies on accurate models to retrieve relevant results for queries across modalities such as image, text, and video. In this paper, we build upon previous work by tackling the difficulty of evaluating models both quantitatively and qualitatively quickly. We present DIME (Dataset, Index, Model, Embedding), a modality-agnostic tool that handles multimodal datasets, trained models, and data preprocessors to support straightforward model comparison with a web browser graphical user interface. DIME inherently supports building modality-agnostic queryable indexes and extraction of relevant feature embeddings, and thus effectively doubles as an efficient cross-modal tool to explore and search through datasets.
Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering with Electronic Health Records
Park, Junwoo, Cho, Youngwoo, Lee, Haneol, Choo, Jaegul, Choi, Edward
Question Answering (QA) on Electronic Health Records (EHR), namely EHR QA, can work as a crucial milestone towards developing an intelligent agent in healthcare. EHR data are typically stored in a relational database, which can also be converted to a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), allowing two approaches for EHR QA: Table-based QA and Knowledge Graph-based QA. We hypothesize that the graph-based approach is more suitable for EHR QA as graphs can represent relations between entities and values more naturally compared to tables, which essentially require JOIN operations. To validate our hypothesis, we first construct EHR QA datasets based on MIMIC-III, where the same question-answer pairs are represented in SQL (table-based) and SPARQL (graph-based), respectively. We then test a state-of-the-art EHR QA model on both datasets where the model demonstrated superior QA performance on the SPARQL version. Finally, we open-source both MIMICSQL* and MIMIC-SPARQL* to encourage further EHR QA research in both direction
What is Cognitive Search?
Powerful Indexing Cognitive search, unlike keyword search, crawls and ingests both structured and unstructured data. Keep in mind: experts estimate that as much as 80-90% of your data is unstructured, including email, customer surveys and social media. Cognitive search solutions also enable developers to embed search in other applications using SDKs, APIs, and other tools. This is important because your data isn't confined to databases: it's scattered across the enterprise. So, search has to work where your teams work -- in Slack, Salesforce, Jira, Amazon Web Services (AWS), etc. Natural Language Processing (NLP) Keyword search is basically a matching game played with digital data.
Effective Distributed Representations for Academic Expert Search
Berger, Mark, Zavrel, Jakub, Groth, Paul
Expert search aims to find and rank experts based on a user's query. In academia, retrieving experts is an efficient way to navigate through a large amount of academic knowledge. Here, we study how different distributed representations of academic papers (i.e. embeddings) impact academic expert retrieval. We use the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset and experiment with different configurations of a document-centric voting model for retrieval. In particular, we explore the impact of the use of contextualized embeddings on search performance. We also present results for paper embeddings that incorporate citation information through retrofitting. Additionally, experiments are conducted using different techniques for assigning author weights based on author order. We observe that using contextual embeddings produced by a transformer model trained for sentence similarity tasks produces the most effective paper representations for document-centric expert retrieval. However, retrofitting the paper embeddings and using elaborate author contribution weighting strategies did not improve retrieval performance.
Mastering Presto: Hands-On Learning
Mastering Presto: Hands-On Learning Learn Presto - distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data! Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes. Presto was designed and written from the ground up for interactive analytics and approaches the speed of commercial data warehouses while scaling to the size of organisations like Facebook. In the first part of the course I will talk about Presto's theory including Presto's architecture and components - coordinator, worker, connector, query execution model, etc. Additionally, I will explain to you how Kafka, Cassandra, Hive, PostgreSQL and Redshift work before I mention the specifics to their connectors.
A Survey of Knowledge-Enhanced Text Generation
Yu, Wenhao, Zhu, Chenguang, Li, Zaitang, Hu, Zhiting, Wang, Qingyun, Ji, Heng, Jiang, Meng
The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.
Efficient open-domain question-answering on Vespa.ai
We use Recall@position as the main evaluation metric for the retriever. The obvious goal of the retriever is to have the highest recall possible at the lowest possible position. Since the final top position passages are re-ranked using the BERT-based reader, the fewer passages we need to evaluate the better the run time complexity and performance.