OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Wikipassageqa: A benchmark collection for research on non-factoid answer passage retrieval
Authors: Daniel Cohen, Liu Yang, W. Bruce Croft
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2018
Year: 2018

With the rise in mobile and voice search, answer passage retrieval acts as a critical component of an effective information retrieval system for open domain question answering. Currently, there are no comparable collections that address non-factoid question answering within larger documents while simultaneously providing enough examples sufficient to train a deep neural network. In this paper, we introduce a new Wikipedia based collection specific for non-factoid answer passage retrieval containing thousands of questions with annotated answers and show benchmark results on a variety of state of the art neural architectures and retrieval models. The experimental results demonstrate the unique challenges presented by answer passage retrieval within topically relevant documents for future research.
Tablepedia: Automating pdf table reading in an experimental evidence exploration and analytic system
Authors: Wenhao Yu, Zongze Li, Qingkai Zeng, Meng Jiang
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Web research, data science, and artificial intelligence have been rapidly changing our life and society. Researchers and practitioners in the fields take a large amount of time to read literature and compare existing approaches. It would significantly improve their efficiency if there was a system that extracted and managed experimental evidences (say, a specific method achieves a score of a specific metric on a specific dataset) from tables of paper PDFs for search, exploration, and analytic. We build such a demonstration system, called Tablepedia, that use rule-based and learning-based methods to automate the “reading” of PDF tables. It has three modules: template recognition, unification, and SQL operations. We implement three functions to facilitate research and practice: (1) finding related methods and datasets, (2) finding top-performing baseline methods, and (3) finding conflicting reported numbers. A pointer to a screencast on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/310162310
Learning from on-line user feedback in neural question answering on the web
Authors: Bernhard Kratzwald, Stefan Feuerriegel
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Question answering promises a means of efficiently searching web-based content repositories such as Wikipedia. However, the systems of this type most prevalent today merely conduct their learning once in an offline training phase while, afterwards, all parameters remain static. Thus, the possibility of improvement over time is precluded. As a consequence of this shortcoming, question answering is not currently taking advantage of the wealth of feedback mechanisms that have become prominent on the web (e. g., buttons for liking, voting, or sharing). This is the first work that introduces a question-answering system for (web-based) content repositories with an on-line mechanism for user feedback. Our efforts have resulted in QApedia - a framework for on-line improvement based on shallow user feedback. In detail, we develop a simple feedback mechanism that allows users to express whether a question was answered satisfactorily or whether a different answer is needed. Even for this simple mechanism, the implementation represents a daunting undertaking due to the complex, multi-staged operations that underlie state-of-the-art systems for neural questions answering. Another challenge with regard to web-based use is that feedback is limited (and possibly even noisy), as the true labels remain unknown. We thus address these challenges through a novel combination of neural question answering and a dynamic process based on distant supervision, asynchronous updates, and an automatic validation of feedback credibility in order to mine high-quality training samples from the web for the purpose of achieving continuous improvement over time. Our QApedia framework is the first question-answering system that continuously refines its capabilities by improving its now dynamic content repository and thus the underlying answer extraction. QApedia not only achieves state-of-the-art results over several benchmarking datasets, but we further show that it successfully manages to learn from shallow user feedback, even when the feedback is noisy or adversarial. Altogether, our extensive experimental evaluation, with more than 2,500 hours of computational experiments, demonstrates that a feedback mechanism as simple as a binary vote (which is widespread on the web) can considerably improve performance when combined with an efficient framework for continuous learning.
Registration of multiple point sets using the EM algorithm
Authors: Jacob Goldberger
Venue: Conference ICCV 1999
Year: 1999

We address the problem of global registration between multiple d-dimensional point patterns with a given correspondence. The actual overlapping is not necessarily between pairs. Instead, it can be between any number of patterns. It is assumed that each pattern is a portion of an image of an unobserved object under a distinct rigid transformation. We derive an iterative solution for the problem of global registration of the patterns in order to reconstruct the original object. Our solution is based on the EM algorithm and it generalizes the well known solutions for the two-pattern case. We also suggest a very efficient method to implement the proposed algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method.
Question-answer topic model for question retrieval in community question answering
Authors: Zongcheng Ji, Fei Xu, Bin Wang, Ben He
Venue: Conference CIKM 2012
Year: 2012

The major challenge for Question Retrieval (QR) in Community Question Answering (CQA) is the lexical gap between the queried question and the historical questions. This paper proposes a novel Question-Answer Topic Model (QATM) to learn the latent topics aligned across the question-answer pairs to alleviate the lexical gap problem, with the assumption that a question and its paired answer share the same topic distribution. Experiments conducted on a real world CQA dataset from Yahoo! Answers show that combining both parts properly can get more knowledge than each part or both parts in a simple mixing way and combining our QATM with the state-of-the-art translation-based language model, where the topic and translation information is learned from the question-answer pairs at two different grained semantic levels respectively, can significantly improve the QR performance.
Improved cross-lingual question retrieval for community question answering
Authors: Andreas Rücklé, Krishnkant Swarnkar, Iryna Gurevych
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

We perform cross-lingual question retrieval in community question answering (cQA), i.e., we retrieve similar questions for queries that are given in another language. The standard approach to cross-lingual information retrieval, which is to automatically translate the query to the target language and continue with a monolingual retrieval model, typically falls short in cQA due to translation errors. This is even more the case for specialized domains such as in technical cQA, which we explore in this work. To remedy, we propose two extensions to this approach that improve cross-lingual question retrieval: (1) we enhance an NMT model with monolingual cQA data to improve the translation quality, and (2) we improve the robustness of a state-of-the-art neural question retrieval model to common translation errors by adding back-translations during training. Our results show that we achieve substantial improvements over the baseline approach and considerably close the gap to a setup where we have access to an external commercial machine translation service (i.e., Google Translate), which is often not the case in many practical scenarios. Our source code and data is publicly available.1
Concept embedded convolutional semantic model for question retrieval
Authors: Pengwei Wang, Yong Zhang, Lei Ji, Jun Yan, Lianwen Jin
Venue: Conference WSDM 2017
Year: 2017

The question retrieval, which aims to find similar questions of a given question, is playing pivotal role in various question answering (QA) systems. This task is quite challenging mainly on three aspects: lexical gap, polysemy and word order. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to simultaneously handle these three problems. We use word combined with corresponding concept information to handle the polysemous problem. The concept embedding and word embedding are learned at the same time from both context-dependent and context-independent view. The lexical gap problem is handled since the semantic information has been encoded into the embedding. Then, we propose to use a high-level feature embedded convolutional semantic model to learn the question embedding by inputting the concept embedding and word embedding without manually labeling training data. The proposed framework nicely represent the hierarchical structures of word information and concept information in sentences with their layer-by-layer composition and pooling. Finally, the framework is trained in a weakly-supervised manner on question answer pairs, which can be directly obtained without manually labeling. Experiments on two real question answering datasets show that the proposed framework can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art solutions.
Retrieval models for question and answer archives
Authors: Xiaobing Xue, Jiwoon Jeon, W. Bruce Croft
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2008
Year: 2008

Retrieval in a question and answer archive involves finding good answers for a user's question. In contrast to typical document retrieval, a retrieval model for this task can exploit question similarity as well as ranking the associated answers. In this paper, we propose a retrieval model that combines a translation-based language model for the question part with a query likelihood approach for the answer part. The proposed model incorporates word-to-word translation probabilities learned through exploiting different sources of information. Experiments show that the proposed translation based language model for the question part outperforms baseline methods significantly. By combining with the query likelihood language model for the answer part, substantial additional effectiveness improvements are obtained.
Finding needles in an encyclopedic haystack: Detecting classes among wikipedia articles
Authors: Marius Pasca
Venue: Conference WWW 2018
Year: 2018

A lightweight method distinguishes articles within Wikipedia that are classes (Novel, Book) from other articles (Three Men in a Boat, Diary of a Pilgrimage). It exploits clues available within the article text and within categories associated with articles in Wikipedia, while not requiring any linguistic preprocessing tools such as part of speech taggers, named entity recognizers or syntactic parsers. Experimental results show that classes can be identified among Wikipedia articles in multiple languages, at aggregate precision and recall generally above 0.9 and 0.6 respectively.
Fun facts: Automatic trivia fact extraction from wikipedia
Authors: David Tsurel, Dan Pelleg, Ido Guy, Dafna Shahaf
Venue: Conference WSDM 2017
Year: 2017

A significant portion of web search queries directly refers to named entities. Search engines explore various ways to improve the user experience for such queries. We suggest augmenting search results with trivia facts about the searched entity. Trivia is widely played throughout the world, and was shown to increase users' engagement and retention. Most random facts are not suitable for the trivia section. There is skill (and art) to curating good trivia. In this paper, we formalize a notion of trivia-worthiness and propose an algorithm that automatically mines trivia facts from Wikipedia. We take advantage of Wikipedia's category structure, and rank an entity's categories by their trivia-quality. Our algorithm is capable of finding interesting facts, such as Obama's Grammy or Elvis' stint as a tank gunner. In user studies, our algorithm captures the intuitive notion of "good trivia" 45% higher than prior work. Search-page tests show a 22% decrease in bounce rates and a 12% increase in dwell time, proving our facts hold users' attention.
Effective document labeling with very few seed words: A topic model approach
Authors: Chenliang Li, Jian Xing, Aixin Sun, Zongyang Ma
Venue: Conference CIKM 2016
Year: 2016

Developing text classifiers often requires a large number of labeled documents as training examples. However, manually labeling documents is costly and time-consuming. Recently, a few methods have been proposed to label documents by using a small set of relevant keywords for each category, known as dataless text classification. In this paper, we propose a Seed-Guided Topic Model (named STM) for the dataless text classification task. Given a collection of unlabeled documents, and for each category a small set of seed words that are relevant to the semantic meaning of the category, the STM predicts the category labels of the documents through topic influence. STM models two kinds of topics: category-topics and general-topics. Each category-topic is associated with one specific category, representing its semantic meaning. The general-topics capture the global semantic information underlying the whole document collection. STM assumes that each document is associated with a single category-topic and a mixture of general-topics. A novelty of the model is that STM learns the topics by exploiting the explicit word co-occurrence patterns between the seed words and regular words (i.e., non-seed words) in the document collection. A document is then labeled, or classified, based on its posterior category-topic assignment. Experiments on two widely used datasets show that STM consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art dataless text classifiers. In some tasks, STM can also achieve comparable or even better classification accuracy than the state-of-the-art supervised learning solutions. Our experimental results further show that STM is insensitive to the tuning parameters. Stable performance with little variation can be achieved in a broad range of parameter settings, making it a desired choice for real applications.
Popularity and quality in social news aggregators: A study of reddit and hacker news
Authors: Greg Stoddard
Venue: Conference WWW 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper we seek to understand the relationship between the online popularity of an article and its intrinsic quality. Prior experimental work suggests that the relationship between quality and popularity can be very distorted due to factors like social influence bias and inequality in visibility. We conduct a study of popularity on two different social news aggregators, Reddit and Hacker News. We define quality as the relative number of votes an article would have received if each article was shown, in a bias-free way, to an equal number of users. We propose a simple poisson regression method to estimate this quality metric from time-series voting data. We validate our methods on data from Reddit and Hacker News, as well the experimental data from prior work. This method works well even though the collected data is subject to common social media biases. Using these estimates, we find that popularity on Reddit and Hacker News is a stronger reflection of intrinsic quality than expected.
Whai: Weibull hybrid autoencoding inference for deep topic modeling
Authors: Hao Zhang 0050, Bo Chen 0001, Dandan Guo, Mingyuan Zhou
Venue: Conference ICLR 2018
Year: 2018

To train an inference network jointly with a deep generative topic model, making it both scalable to big corpora and fast in out-of-sample prediction, we develop Weibull hybrid autoencoding inference (WHAI) for deep latent Dirichlet allocation, which infers posterior samples via a hybrid of stochastic-gradient MCMC and autoencoding variational Bayes. The generative network of WHAI has a hierarchy of gamma distributions, while the inference network of WHAI is a Weibull upward-downward variational autoencoder, which integrates a deterministic-upward deep neural network, and a stochastic-downward deep generative model based on a hierarchy of Weibull distributions. The Weibull distribution can be used to well approximate a gamma distribution with an analytic Kullback-Leibler divergence, and has a simple reparameterization via the uniform noise, which help efficiently compute the gradients of the evidence lower bound with respect to the parameters of the inference network. The effectiveness and efficiency of WHAI are illustrated with experiments on big corpora.
Legal summarization for multi-role debate dialogue via controversy focus mining and multi-task learning
Authors: Xinyu Duan, Yating Zhang, Lin Yuan, Xin Zhou, Xiaozhong Liu, Tianyi Wang, Ruocheng Wang, Qiong Zhang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu
Venue: Conference CIKM 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-role court debate is a critical component in a civil trial where parties from different camps (plaintiff, defendant, witness, judge, etc.) actively involved. Unlike other types of dialogue, court debate can be lengthy, and important information, with respect to the controversy focus(es), often hides within the redundant and colloquial dialogue data. Summarizing court debate can be a novel but significant task to assist judge to effectively make the legal decision for the target trial. In this work, we propose an innovative end-to-end model to address this problem. Unlike prior summarization efforts, the proposed model projects the multi-role debate into the controversy focus space, which enables high-quality essential utterance(s) extraction in terms of legal knowledge and judicial factors. An extensive set of experiments with a large civil trial dataset shows that the proposed model can provide more accurate and readable summarization against several alternatives in the multi-role court debate scene.
Illustrate your story: Enriching text with images
Authors: Sreyasi Nag Chowdhury, William Cheng, Gerard de Melo, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
Venue: Conference WSDM 2020
Year: 2020

Human perception is known to be predominantly visual. As modern web infrastructure promoted the storage of media, the web-data paradigm shifted from text-only documents to those containing text and images. A multitude of blog posts, news articles, and social media posts exist on the Internet today as examples of multimodal stories. The manual alignment of images and text in a story is time-consuming and labor intensive. We present a web application for automatically selecting relevant images from an album and placing them in suitable contexts within a body of text. The application solves a global optimization problem that maximizes the coherence of text paragraphs and image descriptors, and allows for exploring the underlying image descriptors and similarity metrics. Experiments show that our method can align images with texts with high semantic fit, and to user satisfaction.
Federated tensor factorization for computational phenotyping
Authors: Yejin Kim, Jimeng Sun, Hwanjo Yu, Xiaoqian Jiang
Venue: Conference KDD 2017
Year: 2017

Tensor factorization models offer an effective approach to convert massive electronic health records into meaningful clinical concepts (phenotypes) for data analysis. These models need a large amount of diverse samples to avoid population bias. An open challenge is how to derive phenotypes jointly across multiple hospitals, in which direct patient-level data sharing is not possible (e.g., due to institutional policies). In this paper, we developed a novel solution to enable federated tensor factorization for computational phenotyping without sharing patient-level data. We developed secure data harmonization and federated computation procedures based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Using this method, the multiple hospitals iteratively update tensors and transfer secure summarized information to a central server, and the server aggregates the information to generate phenotypes. We demonstrated with real medical datasets that our method resembles the centralized training model (based on combined datasets) in terms of accuracy and phenotypes discovery while respecting privacy.
Evaluating strategies for similarity search on the web
Authors: Taher H. Haveliwala, Aristides Gionis, Dan Klein, Piotr Indyk
Venue: Conference WWW 2002
Year: 2002

Finding pages on the Web that are similar to a query page (Related Pages) is an important component of modern search engines. A variety of strategies have been proposed for answering Related Pages queries, but comparative evaluation by user studies is expensive, especially when large strategy spaces must be searched (e.g., when tuning parameters). We present a technique for automatically evaluating strategies using Web hierarchies, such as Open Directory, in place of user feedback. We apply this evaluation methodology to a mix of document representation strategies, including the use of text, anchor-text, and links. We discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches examined. Finally, we describe how to e#ciently construct a similarity index out of our chosen strategies, and provide sample results from our index.
Investigating passage-level relevance and its role in document-level relevance judgment
Authors: Zhijing Wu, Jiaxin Mao, Yiqun Liu, Min Zhang, Shaoping Ma
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2019
Year: 2019

The understanding of the process of relevance judgment helps to inspire the design of retrieval models. Traditional retrieval models usually estimate relevance based on document-level signals. Recent works consider a more fine-grain, passage-level relevance information, which can further enhance retrieval performance. However, it lacks a detailed analysis of how passage-level relevance signals determine or influence the relevance judgment of the whole document. To investigate the role of passage-level relevance in the document-level relevance judgment, we construct an ad-hoc retrieval dataset with both passage-level and document-level relevance labels. A thorough analysis reveals that: 1) there is a strong correlation between the document-level relevance and the fractions of irrelevant passages to highly relevant passages; 2) the position, length and query similarity of passages play different roles in the determination of document-level relevance; 3) The sequential passage-level relevance within a document is a potential indicator for the document-level relevance. Based on the relationship between passage-level and document-level relevance, we also show that utilizing passage-level relevance signals can improve existing document ranking models. This study helps us better understand how users perceive relevance for a document and inspire the designing of novel ranking models leveraging fine-grain, passage-level relevance signals.