OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Rule-based opinion target and aspect extraction to acquire affective knowledge
Authors: Stefan Gindl, Albert Weichselbraun, Arno Scharl
Venue: Conference WWW 2013
Year: 2013

Opinion holder and opinion target extraction are among the most popular and challenging problems tackled by opinion mining researchers, recognizing the significant business value of such components and their importance for applications such as media monitoring and Web intelligence. This paper describes an approach that combines opinion target extraction with aspect extraction using syntactic patterns. It expands previous work limited by sentence boundaries and includes a heuristic for anaphora resolution to identify targets across sentences. Furthermore, it demonstrates the application of concepts known from research on open information extraction to the identification of relevant opinion aspects. Qualitative analyses performed on a corpus of 100,000 Amazon product reviews show that the approach is promising. The extracted opinion targets and aspects are useful for enriching common knowledge resources and opinion mining ontologies, and support practitioners and researchers to identify opinions in document collections.
Automatic feature generation on heterogeneous graph for music recommendation
Authors: Chun Guo, Xiaozhong Liu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2015
Year: 2015

Online music streaming services (MSS) experienced exponential growth over the past decade. The giant MSS providers not only built massive music collection with metadata, they also accumulated large amount of heterogeneous data generated from users, e.g. listening history, comment, bookmark, and user generated playlist. While various kinds of user data can potentially be used to enhance the music recommendation performance, most existing studies only focused on audio content features and collaborative filtering approaches based on simple user listening history or music rating. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to solve the music recommendation problem by means of heterogeneous graph mining. Meta-path based features are automatically generated from a content-rich heterogeneous graph schema with 6 types of nodes and 16 types of relations. Meanwhile, we use learning-to-rank approach to integrate different features for music recommendation. Experiment results show that the automatically generated graphical features significantly (p<0.0001) enhance state-of-the-art collaborative filtering algorithm.
Learning and transferring social and item visibilities for personalized recommendation
Authors: Xiao Lin, Min Zhang, Yongfeng Zhang, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma
Venue: Conference CIKM 2017
Year: 2017

User feedback in the form of movie-watching history, item ratings, or product consumption is very helpful in training recommender systems. However, relatively few interactions between items and users can be observed. Instances of missing user--item entries are caused by the user not seeing the item (although the actual preference to the item could still be positive) or the user seeing the item but not liking it. Separating these two cases enables missing interactions to be modeled with finer granularity, and thus reflects user preferences more accurately. However, most previous studies on the modeling of missing instances have not fully considered the case where the user has not seen the item. Social connections are known to be helpful for modeling users' potential preferences more extensively, although a similar visibility problem exists in accurately identifying social relationships. That is, when two users are unaware of each other's existence, they have no opportunity to connect. In this paper, we propose a novel user preference model for recommender systems that considers the visibility of both items and social relationships. Furthermore, the two kinds of information are coordinated in a unified model inspired by the idea of transfer learning. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three real-world datasets in comparison with five state-of-the-art approaches. The encouraging performance of the proposed system verifies the effectiveness of social knowledge transfer and the modeling of both item and social visibilities.
Event2vec: Neural embeddings for news events
Authors: Vinay Setty, Katja Hose
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2018
Year: 2018

Representation of news events as latent feature vectors is essential for several tasks, such as news recommendation, news event linking, etc. However, representations proposed in the past fail to capture the complex network structure of news events. In this paper we propose Event2Vec, a novel way to learn latent feature vectors for news events using a network. We use recently proposed network embedding techniques, which are proven to be very effective for various prediction tasks in networks. As events involve different classes of nodes, such as named entities, temporal information, etc, general purpose network embeddings are agnostic to event semantics. To address this problem, we propose biased random walks that are tailored to capture the neighborhoods of news events in event networks. We then show that these learned embeddings are effective for news event recommendation and news event linking tasks using strong baselines, such as vanilla Node2Vec, and other state-of-the-art graph-based event ranking techniques.
Web search of fashion items with multimodal querying
Authors: Katrien Laenen, Susana Zoghbi, Marie-Francine Moens
Venue: Conference WSDM 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal fashion search paradigm where e-commerce data is searched with a multimodal query composed of both an image and text. In this setting, the query image shows a fashion product that the user likes and the query text allows to change certain product attributes to fit the product to the user's desire. Multimodal search gives users the means to clearly express what they are looking for. This is in contrast to current e-commerce search mechanisms, which are cumbersome and often fail to grasp the customer's needs. Multimodal search requires intermodal representations of visual and textual fashion attributes which can be mixed and matched to form the user's desired product, and which have a mechanism to indicate when a visual and textual fashion attribute represent the same concept. With a neural network, we induce a common, multimodal space for visual and textual fashion attributes where their inner product measures their semantic similarity. We build a multimodal retrieval model which operates on the obtained intermodal representations and which ranks images based on their relevance to a multimodal query. We demonstrate that our model is able to retrieve images that both exhibit the necessary query image attributes and satisfy the query texts. Moreover, we show that our model substantially outperforms two state-of-the-art retrieval models adapted to multimodal fashion search.
To suggest, or not to suggest for queries with diverse intents: Optimizing search result presentation
Authors: Makoto P. Kato, Katsumi Tanaka
Venue: Conference WSDM 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a method of optimizing search result presentation for queries with diverse intents, by selectively presenting query suggestions for leading users to more relevant search results. The optimization is based on a probabilistic model of users who click on query suggestions in accordance with their intents, and modified versions of intent-aware evaluation metrics that take into account the co-occurrence between intents. Showing many query suggestions simply increases a chance to satisfy users with diverse intents in this model, while it in fact requires users to spend additional time for scanning and selecting suggestions, and may result in low satisfaction for some users. Therefore, we measured the loss of time caused by query suggestion presentation by conducting a user study in different settings, and included its negative effects in our optimization problem. Our experiments revealed that the optimization of search result presentation significantly improved that of a single ranked list, and was beneficial especially for patient users. Moreover, experimental results showed that our optimization was effective particularly when intents of a query often co-occur with a small subset of intents.
Extending faceted search to the general web
Authors: Weize Kong, James Allan
Venue: Conference CIKM 2014
Year: 2014

Faceted search helps users by offering drill-down options as a complement to the keyword input box, and it has been used successfully for many vertical applications, including e-commerce and digital libraries. However, this idea is not well explored for general web search, even though it holds great potential for assisting multi-faceted queries and exploratory search. In this paper, we explore this potential by extending faceted search into the open-domain web setting, which we call Faceted Web Search. To tackle the heterogeneous nature of the web, we propose to use query-dependent automatic facet generation, which generates facets for a query instead of the entire corpus. To incorporate user feedback on these query facets into document ranking, we investigate both Boolean filtering and soft ranking models. We evaluate Faceted Web Search systems by their utility in assisting users to clarify search intent and find subtopic information. We describe how to build reusable test collections for such tasks, and propose an evaluation method that considers both gain and cost for users. Our experiments testify to the potential of Faceted Web Search, and show Boolean filtering feedback models, which are widely used in conventional faceted search, are less effective than soft ranking models.
Dexter: an open source framework for entity linking
Authors: Diego Ceccarelli, Claudio Lucchese, Salvatore Orlando, Raffaele Perego, Salvatore Trani
Venue: Conference CIKM 2013
Year: 2013

We introduce Dexter, an open source framework for entity linking. The entity linking task aims at identifying all the small text fragments in a document referring to an entity contained in a given knowledge base, e.g., Wikipedia. The annotation is usually organized in three tasks. Given an input document the first task consists in discovering the fragments that could refer to an entity. Since a mention could refer to multiple entities, it is necessary to perform a disambiguation step, where the correct entity is selected among the candidates. Finally, discovered entities are ranked by some measure of relevance. Many entity linking algorithms have been proposed, but unfortunately only a few authors have released the source code or some APIs. As a result, evaluating today the performance of a method on a single subtask, or comparing different techniques is difficult. In this work we present a new open framework, called Dexter, which implements some popular algorithms and provides all the tools needed to develop any entity linking technique. We believe that a shared framework is fundamental to perform fair comparisons and improve the state of the art.
Adversarial domain adaptation for cross-lingual information retrieval with multilingual bert
Authors: Runchuan Wang, Zhao Zhang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Dehong Gao, Yi Wei, Qing He
Venue: Conference CIKM 2021
Year: 2021

Transformer-based language models (e.g. BERT, RoBERT, GPT, etc) have shown remarkable performance in many natural language processing tasks and their multilingual variants make it easier to handle cross-lingual tasks without using machine translation system. In this paper, we apply multilingual BERT in cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) task with triplet loss to learn the relevance between queries and documents written in different languages. Moreover, we align the token embeddings from different languages via adversarial networks to help the language model to learn cross-lingual sentence representation. We achieve the state-of-the-art result on the newly published CLIR dataset: CLIRMatrix. Furthermore, we show that the adversarial multilingual BERT can also get the competitive result in the zero-shot setting in some specific languages when we are lack of CLIR training data in a specific language.
Summarizing legal regulatory documents using transformers
Authors: Svea Klaus, Ria Van Hecke, Kaweh Djafari Naini, Ismail Sengor Altingovde, Juan Bernabé-Moreno, Enrique Herrera-Viedma
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Companies invest a substantial amount of time and resources in ensuring the compliance to the existing regulations or in the form of fines when compliance cannot be proven in auditing procedures. The topic is not only relevant, but also highly complex, given the frequency of changes and amendments, the complexity of the cases and the difficulty of the juristic language. This paper aims at applying advanced extractive summarization to democratize the understanding of regulations, so that non-jurists can decide which regulations deserve further follow-up. To achieve that, we first create a corpus named EUR-LexSum EUR-LexSum containing 4595 curated European regulatory documents and their corresponding summaries. We then fine-tune transformer-based models which, applied to this corpus, yield a superior performance (in terms of ROUGE metrics) compared to a traditional extractive summarization baseline. Our experiments reveal that even with limited amounts of data such transformer-based models are effective in the field of legal document summarization.
Mtlts: A multi-task framework to obtain trustworthy summaries from crisis-related microblogs
Authors: Rajdeep Mukherjee, Uppada Vishnu, Hari Chandana Peruri, Sourangshu Bhattacharya, Koustav Rudra, Pawan Goyal, Niloy Ganguly
Venue: Conference WSDM 2022
Year: 2022

Occurrences of catastrophes such as natural or man-made disasters trigger the spread of rumours over social media at a rapid pace. Presenting a trustworthy and summarized account of the unfolding event in near real-time to the consumers of such potentially unreliable information thus becomes an important task. In this work, we propose MTLTS, the first end-to-end solution for the task that jointly determines the credibility and summary-worthiness of tweets. Our credibility verifier is designed to recursively learn the structural properties of a Twitter conversation cascade, along with the stances of replies towards the source tweet. We then take a hierarchical multi-task learning approach, where the verifier is trained at a lower layer, and the summarizer is trained at a deeper layer where it utilizes the verifier predictions to determine the salience of a tweet. Different from existing disaster-specific summarizers, we model tweet summarization as a supervised task. Such an approach can automatically learn summary-worthy features, and can therefore generalize well across domains. When trained on the PHEME dataset [29], not only do we outperform the strongest baselines for the auxiliary task of verification/rumour detection, we also achieve 21 - 35% gains in the verified ratio of summary tweets, and 16 - 20% gains in ROUGE1-F1 scores over the existing state-of-the-art solutions for the primary task of trustworthy summarization.
From tables to knowledge: Recent advances in table understanding
Authors: Jay Pujara, Pedro A. Szekely, Huan Sun, Muhao Chen
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

A wealth of human knowledge is expressed in structured tables, across web pages, scientific articles, spreadsheets, and databases. This wealth of knowledge is mirrored by diversity in the vast number of layout structures, content types, formats, and surface forms used to express tables. Recent advances in representation learning and knowledge representation have made progress in exploiting structural regularities in tabular data to unlock this knowledge. In this tutorial, we provide a survey of these advances for a host of table understanding tasks, including table segmentation, semantic typing of cells, transforming tables to knowledge graphs, entity linking, and table retrieval tasks for question answering. The structure of the tutorial will include three major modules. The first will provide attendees an introduction to the seminal work in organization of data in tables, and cover the major goals and approaches of computational systems that undertake table understanding. The second module will cover specific models used for table understanding tasks, such as table discovery, table segmentation and layout detection, cell classification and semantic typing, mapping tables to knowledge graphs and linking to known entities, and table retrieval in search and question answering. The final tutorial module will provide a primer for researchers who want to get involved with the table understanding community, providing them a guide to the most commonly used benchmark datasets and models, downstream applications and evaluations, and a sketch of the open problems in table understanding. Our tutorial is designed to be approachable to many different audiences, and will serve as a timely resource in a field that is quickly progressing. To engage audiences, we will incorporate opportunities to ask questions and discuss, as well as small group activities and exercises with other participants. When possible, we will incorporate practical demos that help illustrate the operation of the tools and models we discuss, as well as pointing out places where the existing state-of-the-art system can be improved. Additionally, we will introduce participants to many of the open-source tools and datasets that the tutors have built and curated, helping new researchers begin working on these problems quickly and effectively.
Learning relevant questions for conversational product search using deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Ali Montazeralghaem, James Allan
Venue: Conference WSDM 2022
Year: 2022

We propose RelQuest, a conversational product search model based on reinforcement learning to generate questions from product descriptions in each round of the conversation, directly maximizing any desired metrics (i.e., the ultimate goal of the conversation), objectives, or even an arbitrary user satisfaction signal. By enabling systems to ask questions about user needs, conversational product search has gained increasing attention in recent years. Asking the right questions through conversations helps the system collect valuable feedback to create better user experiences and ultimately increase sales. In contrast, existing conversational product search methods are based on an assumption that there is a set of effectively pre-defined candidate questions for each product to be asked. Moreover, they make strong assumptions to estimate the value of questions in each round of the conversation. Estimating the true value of questions in each round of the conversation is not trivial since it is unknown. Experiments on real-world user purchasing data show the effectiveness of RelQuest at generating questions that maximize standard evaluation measures such as NDCG.
Fast generation of result snippets in web search
Authors: Andrew Turpin, Yohannes Tsegay, David Hawking, Hugh E. Williams
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2007
Year: 2007

The presentation of query biased document snippets as part of results pages presented by search engines has become an expectation of search engine users. In this paper we explore the algorithms and data structures required as part of a search engine to allow efficient generation of query biased snippets. We begin by proposing and analysing a document compression method that reduces snippet generation time by 58% over a baseline using the zlib compression library. These experiments reveal that finding documents on secondary storage dominates the total cost of generating snippets, and so caching documents in RAM is essential for a fast snippet generation process. Using simulation, we examine snippet generation performance for different size RAM caches. Finally we propose and analyse document reordering and compaction, revealing a scheme that increases the number of document cache hits with only a marginal affect on snippet quality. This scheme effectively doubles the number of documents that can fit in a fixed size cache.
A system for query-specific document summarization
Authors: Ramakrishna Varadarajan, Vagelis Hristidis
Venue: Conference CIKM 2006
Year: 2006

There has been a great amount of work on query-independent summarization of documents. However, due to the success of Web search engines query-specific document summarization (query result snippets) has become an important problem, which has received little attention. We present a method to create query-specific summaries by identifying the most query-relevant fragments and combining them using the semantic associations within the document. In particular, we first add structure to the documents in the preprocessing stage and convert them to document graphs. Then, the best summaries are computed by calculating the top spanning trees on the document graphs. We present and experimentally evaluate efficient algorithms that support computing summaries in interactive time. Furthermore, the quality of our summarization method is compared to current approaches using a user survey.
Advances in mining heterogeneous healthcare data
Authors: Fenglong Ma, Muchao Ye, Junyu Luo, Cao Xiao, Jimeng Sun
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Thanks to the explosion of heterogeneous healthcare data and advanced machine learning and data mining techniques, specifically deep learning methods, we now have an opportunity to make difference in healthcare. In this tutorial, we will present state-of-the-art deep learning methods and their real-world applications, specifically focusing on exploring the unique characteristics of different types of healthcare data. The first half will be spent on introducing recent advances in mining structured healthcare data, including computational phenotyping, disease early detection/risk prediction and treatment recommendation. In the second half, we will focus on challenges specific to the unstructured healthcare data, and introduce advanced deep learning methods in automated ICD coding, understandable medical language translation, clinical trial mining, and medical report generation. This tutorial is intended for students, engineers and researchers who are interested in applying deep learning methods to healthcare, and prerequisite knowledge will be minimal. The tutorial will be concluded with open problems and a Q&A session.
An exploration of tester-based evaluation of user simulators for comparing interactive retrieval systems
Authors: Sahiti Labhishetty, Chengxiang Zhai
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2021
Year: 2021

User simulation is needed for evaluating Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) Systems. However, for any user simulator to be useful, it must be reliable. In this paper, we propose a novel Tester-based evaluation approach to evaluating the reliability of user simulators, in which we would construct a Tester based on a set of IR systems with an expected performance pattern and apply such a Tester to a user simulator to see if the user simulator would generate the expected performance pattern. We construct multiple Testers and apply them to a set of representative user simulators to empirically study the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed Tester-based evaluation method. The results show that Tester-based evaluation is a feasible and effective method for evaluating user simulators and selecting reliable ones for evaluating IIR systems.