Information Retrieval
Modeling Quantum Entanglements in Quantum Language Models
Xie, Mengjiao (Tianjin University) | Hou, Yuexian (Tianjin University) | Zhang, Peng (Tianjin University) | Li, Jingfei (Tianjin University) | Li, Wenjie (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) | Song, Dawei (Tianjin University)
Recently, a Quantum Language Model (QLM) was proposed to model term dependencies upon Quantum Theory (QT) framework and successively applied in Information Retrieval (IR). Nevertheless, QLM's dependency is based on co-occurrences of terms and has not yet taken into account the Quantum Entanglement (QE), which is a key quantum concept and has a significant cognitive implication. In QT, an entangled state can provide a more complete description for the nature of realities, and determine intrinsic correlations of considered objects globally, rather than those co-occurrences on the surface. It is, however, a real challenge to decide and measure QE using the classical statistics of texts in a post-measurement configuration. In order to circumvent this problem, we theoretically prove the connection between QE and statistically Unconditional Pure Dependence (UPD). Since UPD has an implementable deciding algorithm, we can in turn characterize QE by extracting the UPD patterns from texts. This leads to a measurable QE, based on which we further advance the existing QLM framework. We empirically compare our model with related models, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
Coactive Learning
Shivaswamy, Pannaga, Joachims, Thorsten
We propose Coactive Learning as a model of interaction between a learning system and a human user, where both have the common goal of providing results of maximum utility to the user. Interactions in the Coactive Learning model take the following form: at each step, the system (e.g. search engine) receives a context (e.g. query) and predicts an object (e.g. ranking); the user responds by correcting the system if necessary, providing a slightly improved but not necessarily optimal object as feedback. We argue that such preference feedback can be inferred in large quantity from observable user behavior (e.g., clicks in web search), unlike the optimal feedback required in the expert model or the cardinal valuations required for bandit learning. Despite the relaxed requirements for the feedback, we show that it is possible to adapt many existing online learning algorithms to the coactive framework. In particular, we provide algorithms that achieve square root regret in terms of cardinal utility, even though the learning algorithm never observes cardinal utility values directly. We also provide an algorithm with logarithmic regret in the case of strongly convex loss functions. An extensive empirical study demonstrates the applicability of our model and algorithms on a movie recommendation task, as well as ranking for web search.
Topic Extraction and Bundling of Related Scientific Articles
Automatic classification of scientific articles based on common characteristics is an interesting problem with many applications in digital library and information retrieval systems. Properly organized articles can be useful for automatic generation of taxonomies in scientific writings, textual summarization, efficient information retrieval etc. Generating article bundles from a large number of input articles, based on the associated features of the articles is tedious and computationally expensive task. In this report we propose an automatic two-step approach for topic extraction and bundling of related articles from a set of scientific articles in real-time. For topic extraction, we make use of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling techniques and for bundling, we make use of hierarchical agglomerative clustering techniques. We run experiments to validate our bundling semantics and compare it with existing models in use. We make use of an online crowdsourcing marketplace provided by Amazon called Amazon Mechanical Turk to carry out experiments. We explain our experimental setup and empirical results in detail and show that our method is advantageous over existing ones.
Exemplar-Based Topic Detection in Twitter Streams
Elbagoury, Ahmed (University of Waterloo) | Ibrahim, Rania (University of Waterloo) | Farahat, Ahmed (University of Waterloo) | Kamel, Mohamed (University of Waterloo) | Karray, Fakhri (University of Waterloo)
Detecting topics in Twitter streams has been gaining an increasing amount of attention. It can be of great support for communities struck by natural disasters, and could assist companies and political parties understand users' opinions and needs. Traditional approaches for topic detection focus on representing topics using terms, are negatively affected by length limitation and the lack of context associated with tweets.In this work, we propose an Exemplar-based approach for topic detection, in which detected topics are represented using a few selected tweets. Using exemplar tweets instead of a set of key words allows for an easy interpretation of the meaning of the detected topics. Experimental evaluation on benchmark Twitter datasets shows that the proposed topic detection approach achieves the best term precision. It does this while maintaining good topic recall and running time compared to other approaches.
Construction of FuzzyFind Dictionary using Golay Coding Transformation for Searching Applications
Kowsari, Kamran, Yammahi, Maryam, Bari, Nima, Vichr, Roman, Alsaby, Faisal, Berkovich, Simon Y.
Searching through a large volume of data is very critical for companies, scientists, and searching engines applications due to time complexity and memory complexity. In this paper, a new technique of generating FuzzyFind Dictionary for text mining was introduced. We simply mapped the 23 bits of the English alphabet into a FuzzyFind Dictionary or more than 23 bits by using more FuzzyFind Dictionary, and reflecting the presence or absence of particular letters. This representation preserves closeness of word distortions in terms of closeness of the created binary vectors within Hamming distance of 2 deviations. This paper talks about the Golay Coding Transformation Hash Table and how it can be used on a FuzzyFind Dictionary as a new technology for using in searching through big data. This method is introduced by linear time complexity for generating the dictionary and constant time complexity to access the data and update by new data sets, also updating for new data sets is linear time depends on new data points. This technique is based on searching only for letters of English that each segment has 23 bits, and also we have more than 23-bit and also it could work with more segments as reference table.
Named Entity Recognition in Travel-Related Search Queries
Cowan, Brooke (Expedia, Inc.) | Zethelius, Sven (Expedia, Inc.) | Luk, Brittany (Expedia, Inc.) | Baras, Teodora (Expedia, Inc.) | Ukarde, Prachi (Expedia, Inc.) | Zhang, Daodao (Expedia, Inc.)
This paper addresses the problem of named entity recognition (NER) in travel-related search queries. NER is an important step toward a richer understanding of user-generated inputs in information retrieval systems. NER in queries is challenging due to minimal context and few structural clues. NER in restricted-domain queries is useful in vertical search applications, for example following query classification in general search. This paper describes an efficient machine learning-based solution for the high-quality extraction of semantic entities from query inputs in a restricted-domain information retrieval setting. We apply a conditional random field (CRF) sequence model to travel-domain search queries and achieve high-accuracy results. Our approach yields an overall F1 score of 86.4% on a held-out test set, outperforming a baseline score of 82.0% on a CRF with standard features. The resulting NER classifier is currently in use in a real-life travel search engine.
Mining User Intents in Twitter: A Semi-Supervised Approach to Inferring Intent Categories for Tweets
Wang, Jinpeng (Peking University) | Cong, Gao (Nanyang Technological University) | Zhao, Xin Wayne (Renmin University of China) | Li, Xiaoming (Peking University)
In this paper, we propose to study the problem of identifying and classifying tweets into intent categories. For example, a tweet “I wanna buy a new car” indicates the user’s intent for buying a car. Identifying such intent tweets will have great commercial value among others. In particular, it is important that we can distinguish different types of intent tweets. We propose to classify intent tweets into six categories, namely Food & Drink, Travel, Career & Education, Goods & Services, Event and Activities and Trifle. We propose a semisupervised learning approach to categorizing intent tweets into the six categories.We construct a test collection by using a bootstrap method. Our experimental results show that our approach is effective in inferring intent categories for tweets.
Unsupervised Phrasal Near-Synonym Generation from Text Corpora
Gupta, Dishan (Carnegie Mellon University) | Carbonell, Jaime (Carnegie Mellon University) | Gershman, Anatole (Carnegie Mellon University) | Klein, Steve (Meaningful Machines, LLC) | Miller, David (Meaningful Machines, LLC)
Unsupervised discovery of synonymous phrases is useful in a variety of tasks ranging from text mining and search engines to semantic analysis and machine translation. This paper presents an unsupervised corpus-based conditional model: Near-Synonym System (NeSS) for finding phrasal synonyms and near synonyms that requires only a large monolingual corpus. The method is based on maximizing information-theoretic combinations of shared contexts and is parallelizable for large-scale processing. An evaluation framework with crowd-sourced judgments is proposed and results are compared with alternate methods, demonstrating considerably superior results to the literature and to thesaurus look up for multi-word phrases. Moreover, the results show that the statistical scoring functions and overall scalability of the system are more important than language specific NLP tools. The method is language-independent and practically useable due to accuracy and real-time performance via parallel decomposition.
Learning Word Vectors Efficiently Using Shared Representations and Document Representations
Luo, Qun (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) | Xu, Weiran (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)
We propose some better word embedding models based on vLBL model and ivLBL model by sharing representations between context and target words and using document representations. Our proposed models are much simpler which have almost half less parameters than the state-of-the-art methods. We achieve better results on word analogy task than the best ones reported before using significantly less training data and computing time.
Ordering-Sensitive and Semantic-Aware Topic Modeling
Yang, Min (The University of Hong Kong) | Cui, Tianyi (Zhejiang University) | Tu, Wenting (The University of Hong Kong)
Topic modeling of textual corpora is an important and challenging problem. In most previous work, the “bag-of-words” assumption is usually made which ignores the ordering of words. This assumption simplifies the computation, but it unrealistically loses the ordering information and the semantic of words in the context. In this paper, we present a Gaussian Mixture Neural Topic Model (GMNTM) which incorporates both the ordering of words and the semantic meaning of sentences into topic modeling. Specifically, we represent each topic as a cluster of multi-dimensional vectors and embed the corpus into a collection of vectors generated by the Gaussian mixture model. Each word is affected not only by its topic, but also by the embedding vector of its surrounding words and the context. The Gaussian mixture components and the topic of documents, sentences and words can be learnt jointly. Extensive experiments show that our model can learn better topics and more accurate word distributions for each topic. Quantitatively, comparing to state-of-the-art topic modeling approaches, GMNTM obtains significantly better performance in terms of perplexity, retrieval accuracy and classification accuracy.