OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
KANDINSKY: Abstract Art-Inspired Visualization of Social Discussions
Authors: Christina Lui, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Adam Jatowt
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Many social media sites allow users to upload text, images, and videos (collectively referred to asanchor post) for public consumption. These posts may attract hundreds of comments from many social users leading to social conversations (ie discussions). Tools that can facilitate user-friendly and effective understanding and analysis of large volumes of comments associated with anchor posts can be of great benefit to individuals and organizations. In this demonstration, we present a novel end-to-end visualization system called Kandinsky to supportmulti-faceted visualization of social discussions associated with an anchor post. In Kandinsky, the social discussion landscape is visualized using a collection of colorfulcircles andconcentric circles, which are inspired from the famous abstract arts called"Squares with Concentric Circles" and"Several Circles" by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Intuitively, a circle and a concentric circle represent a social comment and a collection of comments in a discussion thread, respectively. We discuss various innovative features of Kandinsky and demonstrate its effectiveness.
A Horizontal Patent Test Collection
Authors: Mihai Lupu, Alexandros Bampoulidis, Luca Papariello
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

We motivate the need for, and describe the contents of a novel patent research collection, publicly available and for free, covering multimodal and multilingual data from six patent authorities. The new patent test collection complements existing patent test collections, which are vertical (one domain or one authority over many years). Instead, the new collection is horizontal: it includes all technical domains from the major patenting authorities over the relatively short time span of two years. In addition to bringing together documents currently scattered across different test collections, the collection provides, for the first time, Korean documents, to complement those from Europe, US, Japan, and China. This new collection can be used on a variety of tasks beyond traditional information retrieval. We exemplify this with a task of high-relevance today: de-anonymisation.
Hot Topic-Aware Retweet Prediction with Masked Self-attentive Model
Authors: Renfeng Ma, Xiangkun Hu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Social media users create millions of microblog entries on various topics each day. Retweet behaviour play a crucial role in spreading topics on social media. Retweet prediction task has received considerable attention in recent years. The majority of existing retweet prediction methods are focus on modeling user preference by utilizing various information, such as user profiles, user post history, user following relationships, etc. Yet, the users exposures towards real-time posting from their followees contribute significantly to making retweet predictions, considering that the users may participate into the hot topics discussed by their followees rather than be limited to their previous interests. To make efficient use of hot topics, we propose a novel masked self-attentive model to perform the retweet prediction task by perceiving the hot topics discussed by the users' followees. We incorporate the posting histories of users with external memory and utilize a hierarchical attention mechanism to construct the users' interests. Hence, our model can be jointly hot-topic aware and user interests aware to make a final prediction. Experimental results on a dataset collected from Twitter demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods.
π-Net: A Parallel Information-sharing Network for Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendations
Authors: Muyang Ma, Pengjie Ren, Yujie Lin, Zhumin Chen, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Sequential Recommendation (SR) is the task of recommending the next item based on a sequence of recorded user behaviors. We study SR in a particularly challenging context, in which multiple individual users share a single account (shared-account) and in which user behaviors are available in multiple domains (cross-domain). These characteristics bring new challenges on top of those of the traditional SR task. On the one hand, we need to identify different user behaviors under the same account in order to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. On the other hand, we need to discriminate the behaviors from one domain that might be helpful to improve recommendations in the other domains.
Looking for Opportunities: Challenges in Procurement Search
Authors: Stuart Mackie, David Macdonald, Leif Azzopardi, Yashar Moshfeghi
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Procurement legislation stipulates that information about the goods, services, or works, that tax-funded authorities wish to purchase are made publicly available in a procurement contract notice. However, for businesses wishing to tender for such competitive opportunities, finding relevant procurement contract notices presents a challenging professional search task. In this talk, we will provide an overview of procurement search and then describe the challenges in addressing the related search and recommendation tasks.
Addressing Vocabulary Gap in E-commerce Search
Authors: Subhadeep Maji, Rohan Kumar, Manish Bansal, Kalyani Roy, Mohit Kumar, Pawan Goyal
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

E-commerce customers express their purchase intents in several ways, some of which may use a different vocabulary than that of the product catalog. For example, the intent for "women maternity gown" is often expressed with the query, "ladies pregnancy dress". Search engines typically suffer from poor performance on such queries because of low overlap between query terms and specifications of the desired products. Past work has referred to these queries as vocabulary gap queries. In our experiments, we show that our technique significantly outperforms strong baselines and also show its real-world effectiveness with an online A/B experiment.
A Pipeline for Disaster Response and Relief Coordination
Authors: Pranav Maneriker, Nikhita Vedula, Hussein S. Al-Olimat, Jiayong Liang, Omar El-Khoury, Ethan J. Kubatko, Desheng Liu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, Srinivasan Parthasarathy
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Natural disasters such as floods, forest fires, and hurricanes can cause catastrophic damage to human life and infrastructure. We focus on response to hurricanes caused by both river water flooding and storm surge. Using models for storm surge simulation and flood extent prediction, we generate forecasts about areas likely to be highly affected by the disaster. Further, we overlay the simulation results with information about traffic incidents to correlate traffic incidents with other data modality. We present these results in a modularized, interactive map-based visualization, which can help emergency responders to better plan and coordinate disaster response.
WestSearch Plus: A Non-factoid Question-Answering System for the Legal Domain
Authors: Gayle McElvain, George Sanchez, Seán Matthews, Don Teo, Filippo Pompili, Tonya Custis
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

We present a non-factoid QA system that provides legally accurate, jurisdictionally relevant, and conversationally responsive answers to user-entered questions in the legal domain. This commercially available system is entirely based on NLP and IR, and does not rely on a structured knowledge base. WestSearch Plus aims to provide concise one sentence answers for basic questions about the law. It is not restricted in scope to particular topics or jurisdictions. The corpus of potential answers contains approximately 22M documents classified to over 120K legal topics.
Non-factoid Question Answering in the Legal Domain
Authors: Gayle McElvain, George Sanchez, Don Teo, Tonya Custis
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Non-factoid question answering in the legal domain must provide legally correct, jurisdictionally relevant, and conversationally responsive answers to user-entered questions. We present work done on a QA system that is entirely based on IR and NLP, and does not rely on a structured knowledge base. Our system retrieves concise one-sentence answers for basic questions about the law. It is not restricted in scope to particular topics or jurisdictions. The corpus of potential answers contains approximately 22M documents classified to over 120K legal topics.
Demonstrating Requirement Search on a University Degree Search Application
Authors: Nicholas Mendez, Kyle De Freitas, Inzamam Rahaman
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

In many domains of information retrieval, we are required to retrieve documents that describe requirements on a predefined set of terms. A requirement is a relationship between a set of terms and the document. As requirements become more complex by catering for optional, alternative, and combinations of terms, efficiently retrieving documents becomes more challenging due to the exponential size of the search space. In this paper, we propose RevBoMIR, which utilizes a modified Boolean Model for Information Retrieval to retrieve requirements-based documents without sacrificing the expressiveness of requirements. Our proposed approach is particularly useful in domains where documents embed criteria that can be satisfied by mandatory, alternative or disqualifying terms to determine its retrieval. Finally, we present a graph model for representing document requirements, and demonstrate Requirement Search via a university degree search application.
Understanding the Interpretability of Search Result Summaries
Authors: Siyu Mi, Jiepu Jiang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

We examine the interpretability of search results in current web search engines through a lab user study. Particularly, we evaluate search result summary as an interpretable technique that informs users why the system retrieves a result and to which extent the result is useful. We collected judgments about 1,252 search results from 40 users in 160 sessions. Experimental results indicate that the interpretability of a search result summary is a salient factor influencing users' click decisions. Users are less likely to click on a result link if they do not understand why it was retrieved (low transparency) or cannot assess if the result would be useful based on the summary (low assessability). Our findings suggest it is crucial to improve the interpretability of search result summaries and develop better techniques to explain retrieved results to search engine users.
Bridging Gaps: Predicting User and Task Characteristics from Partial User Information
Authors: Matthew Mitsui, Chirag Shah
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Interactive information retrieval (IIR) researchers often conduct laboratory studies to understand the relationship between people seeking information and information retrieval systems. They develop extensive data collection methods and tools create new understanding about the relationship between observable behaviors, searcher context, and underlying cognition, to better support people's information seeking. Yet aside from the problems of data size, realism, and demographics, laboratory studies are limited in the number and nature of phenomena they can study. Hence, data collected in laboratories contains different searcher populations and collects non-overlapping user and task characteristics. While research analyses and collection methods are isolated, how can we further IIR's mission of broad understanding? We approach this as a structure learning problem on incomplete data, determining the extent to which incomplete data can be used to predict user and task characteristics from interactions. In particular, we examine whether combining heterogeneous data sets is more effective than using a single data set alone in prediction. Our results indicate that adding external data significantly improves predictions of searcher characteristics, task characteristics, and behaviors, even when the data does not contain identical information about searchers.
Automatic Curation of Content Tables for Educational Videos
Authors: Arpan Mukherjee, Shubhi Tiwari, Tanya Chowdhury, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Traditional forms of education are increasingly being replaced by online forms of learning. With many degrees being awarded without the requirement of co-location, it becomes necessary to build tools to enhance online learning interfaces. Online educational videos are often long and do not have enough metadata. Viewers trying to learn about a particular topic have to go through the entire video to find suitable content. We present a novel architecture to curate content tables for educational videos. We harvest text and acoustic properties of the videos to form a hierarchical content table (similar to a table of contents available in a textbook). We allow users to browse the video smartly by skipping to a particular portion rather than going through the entire video. We consider other text-based approaches as our baselines. We find that our approach beats the macro F1-score and micro F1-score of baseline by 39.45% and 35.76% respectively. We present our demo as an independent web page where the user can paste the URL of the video to obtain a generated hierarchical table of contents and navigate to the required content. In the spirit of reproducibility, we make our code public at https://goo.gl/Qzku9d and provide a screen cast to be viewed at https://goo.gl/4HSV1v.
Fast Approximate Filtering of Search Results Sorted by Attribute
Authors: Franco Maria Nardini, Roberto Trani, Rossano Venturini
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Several Web search services enable their users with the possibility of sorting the list of results by a specific attribute, e.g., sort "by price" in e-commerce. However, sorting the results by attribute could bring marginally relevant results in the top positions thus leading to a poor user experience. This motivates the definition of the relevance-aware filtering problem. This problem asks to remove results from the attribute-sorted list to maximize its final overall relevance. Recently, an optimal solution to this problem has been proposed. However, it has strong limitations in the Web scenario due to its high computational cost. In this paper, we propose ϵ-Filtering: an efficient approximate algorithm with strong approximation guarantees on the relevance of the final list. More precisely, given an allowed approximation error ϵ, the proposed algorithm finds a(1-ϵ)"optimal filtering, i.e., the relevance of its solution is at least (1-ϵ) times the optimum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ϵ-Filtering against state-of-the-art competitors on two real-world public datasets. Experiments show that ϵ-Filtering achieves the desired levels of effectiveness with a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude with respect to the optimal solution while guaranteeing very small approximation errors.
An Experimentation Platform for Precision Medicine
Authors: Vincent Nguyen, Sarvnaz Karimi, Brian Jin
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Precision medicine - where data from patients, their genes, their lifestyles and the available treatments and their combination are taken into account for finding a suitable treatment - requires searching the biomedical literature and other resources such as clinical trials with the patients' information. The retrieved information could then be used in curating data for clinicians for decision-making. We present information retrieval researchers with an on-line system which enables experimentation in search for precision medicine within the framework provided by the TREC Precision Medicine (PM) track. A number of query and document processing and ranking approaches are provided. These include some ofthe most promising gene mention expansion methods, as well as learning-to-rank using neural networks.
Warm Up Cold-start Advertisements: Improving CTR Predictions via Learning to Learn ID Embeddings
Authors: Feiyang Pan, Shuokai Li, Xiang Ao, Pingzhong Tang, Qing He
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most central problems in computational advertising. Lately, embedding techniques that produce low-dimensional representations of ad IDs drastically improve CTR prediction accuracies. However, such learning techniques are data demanding and work poorly on new ads with little logging data, which is known as the cold-start problem. In this paper, we aim to improve CTR predictions during both the cold-start phase and the warm-up phase when a new ad is added to the candidate pool. We propose Meta-Embedding, a meta-learning-based approach that learns to generate desirable initial embeddings for new ad IDs. The proposed method trains an embedding generator for new ad IDs by making use of previously learned ads through gradient-based meta-learning. In other words, our method learns how to learn better embeddings. When a new ad comes, the trained generator initializes the embedding of its ID by feeding its contents and attributes. Next, the generated embedding can speed up the model fitting during the warm-up phase when a few labeled examples are available, compared to the existing initialization methods. Experimental results on three real-world datasets showed that Meta-Embedding can significantly improve both the cold-start and warm-up performances for six existing CTR prediction models, ranging from lightweight models such as Factorization Machines to complicated deep models such as PNN and DeepFM. All of the above apply to conversion rate (CVR) predictions as well.
Accelerated Query Processing Via Similarity Score Prediction
Authors: Matthias Petri, Alistair Moffat, Joel M. Mackenzie, J. Shane Culpepper, Daniel Beck
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Processing top-k bag-of-words queries is critical to many information retrieval applications, including web-scale search. In this work, we consider algorithmic properties associated with dynamic pruning mechanisms. Such algorithms maintain a score threshold (the k th highest similarity score identified so far) so that low-scoring documents can be bypassed, allowing fast top-k retrieval with no loss in effectiveness. In standard pruning algorithms the score threshold is initialized to the lowest possible value. To accelerate processing, we make use of term- and query-dependent features to predict the final value of that threshold, and then employ the predicted value right from the commencement of processing. Because of the asymmetry associated with prediction errors (if the estimated threshold is too high the query will need to be re-executed in order to assure the correct answer), the prediction process must be risk-sensitive. We explore techniques for balancing those factors, and provide detailed experimental results that show the practical usefulness of the new approach.
Vertical Search Blending: A Real-world Counterfactual Dataset
Authors: Pavel Procházka, Matej Kocián, Jakub Drdák, Jan Vrsovský, Vladimír Kadlec, Jaroslav Kuchar
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Blending of search results from several vertical sources became standard among web search engines. Similar scenarios appear in computational advertising, news recommendation, and other interactive systems. As such environments give only partial feedback, the evaluation of new policies conventionally requires expensive online A/B tests. Counterfactual approach is a promising alternative, nevertheless, it requires specific conditions for a valid off-policy evaluation. We release a large-scale, real-world vertical-blending dataset gathered bySeznam.cz web search engine. The dataset contains logged partial feedback with the corresponding propensity and is thus suited for counterfactual evaluation. We provide basic checks for validity and evaluate several learning methods.
A Lightweight Representation of News Events on Social Media
Authors: Mauricio Quezada, Barbara Poblete
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

The sheer amount of newsworthy information published by users in social media platforms makes it necessary to have efficient and effective methods to filter and organize content. In this scenario, off-the-shelf methods fail to process large amounts of data, which is usually approached by adding more computational resources. Simple data aggregations can help to cope with space and time constraints, while at the same time improve the effectiveness of certain applications, such as topic detection or summarization. We propose a lightweight representation of newsworthy social media data. The proposed representation leverages microblog features, such as redundancy and re-sharing capabilities, by using surrogate texts from shared URLs and word embeddings. Our representation allows us to achieve comparable clustering results to those obtained by using the complete data, while reducing running time and required memory. This is useful when dealing with noisy and raw user-generated social media data.
Adversarial Training for Review-Based Recommendations
Authors: Dimitrios Rafailidis, Fabio Crestani
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Recent studies have shown that incorporating users' reviews into the collaborative filtering strategy can significantly boost the recommendation accuracy. A pressing challenge resides on learning how reviews influence users' rating behaviors. In this paper, we propose an Adversarial Training approach for Review-based recommendations, namely ATR. We design a neural architecture of sequence-to-sequence learning to calculate the deep representations of users' reviews on items following an adversarial training strategy. At the same time we jointly learn to factorize the rating matrix, by regularizing the deep representations of reviews with the user and item latent features. In doing so, our model captures the non-linear associations among reviews and ratings while producing a review for each user-item pair. Our experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods.
Time-Limits and Summaries for Faster Relevance Assessing
Authors: Shahin Rahbariasl, Mark D. Smucker
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Relevance assessing is a critical part of test collection construction as well as applications such as high-recall retrieval that require large amounts of relevance feedback. In these applications, tens of thousands of relevance assessments are required and assessing costs are directly related to the speed at which assessments are made. We conducted a user study with 60 participants where we investigated the impact of time limits (15, 30, and 60 seconds) and document size (full length vs. short summaries) on relevance assessing. Participants were shown either full documents or document summaries that they had to judge within a 15, 30, or 60 seconds time constraint per document. We found that using a time limit as short as 15 seconds or judging document summaries in place of full documents could significantly speed judging without significantly affecting judging quality. Participants found judging document summaries with a 60 second time limit to be the easiest and best experience of the six conditions. While time limits may speed judging, the same speed benefits can be had with high quality document summaries while providing an improved judging experience for assessors.
Ghosting: Contextualized Query Auto-Completion on Amazon Search
Authors: Lakshmi Ramachandran, Uma Murthy
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2019

Query auto-completion presents a ranked list of search queries as suggestions for a customer-entered prefix. Ghosting is the process of auto-completing a search recommendation by highlighting the suggested text inline i.e., within the search box. We present a behavioral recommendation model that uses customer search context to ghost on high-confidence queries. We tested ghosting on over 140 million search sessions. Session-context ghosting increased the acceptance of offered suggestions by 6.18%, reduced misspelled searches by 4.42% and improved net sales by 0.14%.