OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-level Cross-view Contrastive Learning for Knowledge-aware Recommender System
Authors: Ding Zou, Wei Wei, Xian-Ling Mao, Ziyang Wang, Minghui Qiu, Feida Zhu, Xin Cao
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role in recommender systems. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) based model has gradually become the theme of knowledge-aware recommendation (KGR). However, there is a natural deficiency for GNN-based KGR models, that is, the sparse supervised signal problem, which may make their actual performance drop to some extent. Inspired by the recent success of contrastive learning in mining supervised signals from data itself, in this paper, we focus on exploring the contrastive learning in KG-aware recommendation and propose a novel multi-level cross-view contrastive learning mechanism, named MCCLK. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods which generate two graph views by uniform data augmentation schemes such as corruption or dropping, we comprehensively consider three different graph views for KG-aware recommendation, including global-level structural view, local-level collaborative and semantic views. Specifically, we consider the user-item graph as a collaborative view, the item-entity graph as a semantic view, and the user-item-entity graph as a structural view. MCCLK hence performs contrastive learning across three views on both local and global levels, mining comprehensive graph feature and structure information in a self-supervised manner. Besides, in semantic view, a k-Nearest-Neighbor (k NN) item-item semantic graph construction module is proposed, to capture the important item-item semantic relation which is usually ignored by previous work. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts. The implementations are available at: https://github.com/CCIIPLab/MCCLK.
Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Transformer-based Sequential Modelling
Authors: Jie Zou, Evangelos Kanoulas, Pengjie Ren, Zhaochun Ren, Aixin Sun, Cheng Long
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

In Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs), conversations usually involve a set of related items and entities e.g., attributes of items. These items and entities are mentioned in order following the development of a dialogue. In other words, potential sequential dependencies exist in conversations. However, most of the existing CRSs neglect these potential sequential dependencies. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based sequential conversational recommendation method, named TSCR, which models the sequential dependencies in the conversations to improve CRS. We represent conversations by items and entities, and construct user sequences to discover user preferences by considering both mentioned items and entities. Based on the constructed sequences, we deploy a Cloze task to predict the recommended items along a sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that our TSCR model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Representation and Labeling Gap Bridging for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Xinghua Zhang, Bowen Yu, Jiangxia Cao, Quangang Li, Xuebin Wang, Tingwen Liu, Hongbo Xu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to address the challenge of data scarcity in low-resource languages by leveraging knowledge from high-resource languages. Most current work relies on general multilingual language models to represent text, and then uses classic combined tagging (e.g., B-ORG) to annotate entities; However, this approach neglects the lack of cross-lingual alignment of entity representations in language models, and also ignores the fact that entity spans and types have varying levels of labeling difficulty in terms of transferability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, referred to as DLBri, which addresses the issues of representation and labeling simultaneously. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes progressive contrastive learning with source-to-target oriented sentence pairs to pre-finetune the language model, resulting in improved cross-lingual entity-aware representations. Additionally, a decomposition-then-combination procedure is proposed, which separately transfers entity span and type, and then combines their information, to reduce the difficulty of cross-lingual entity labeling. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse language pairs confirm the effectiveness of DLBri.
Subgraph Search over Neural-Symbolic Graphs
Authors: Ye Yuan, Delong Ma, Anbiao Wu, Jianbin Qin
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose neural-symbolic graph databases (NSGDs) that extends traditional graph data with content and structural embeddings in every node. The content embeddings can represent unstructured data (e.g., images, videos, and texts), while structural embeddings can be used to deal with incomplete graphs. We can advocate machine learning models (e.g., deep learning) to transform unstructured data and graph nodes to these embeddings. NSGDs can support a wide range of applications (e.g., online recommendation and natural language question answering) in social-media networks, multi-modal knowledge graphs and etc. As a typical search over graphs, we study subgraph search over a large NSGD, called neural-symbolic subgraph matching (NSMatch) that includes a novel ranking search function. Specifically, we develop a general algorithmic framework to process NSMatch efficiently. Using real-life multi-modal graphs, we experimentally verify the effectiveness, scalability and efficiency of NSMatch.
Long-Form Information Retrieval for Enterprise Matchmaking
Authors: Pengyuan Li, Guang-Jie Ren, Anna Lisa Gentile, Chad DeLuca, Daniel Tan, Sandeep Gopisetty
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Understanding customer requirements is a key success factor for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) enterprises. In a B2C context, most requirements are directly related to products and therefore expressed in keyword-based queries. In comparison, B2B requirements contain more information about customer needs and as such the queries are often in a longer form. Such long-form queries pose significant challenges to the information retrieval task in B2B context. In this work, we address the long-form information retrieval challenges by proposing a combination of (i) traditional retrieval methods, to leverage the lexical match from the query, and (ii) state-of-the-art sentence transformers, to capture the rich context in the long queries. We compare our method against traditional TF-IDF and BM25 models on an internal dataset of 12,368 pairs of long-form requirements and products sold. The evaluation shows promising results and provides directions for future work.
EDIndex: Enabling Fast Data Queries in Edge Storage Systems
Authors: Qiang He, Siyu Tan, Feifei Chen, Xiaolong Xu, Lianyong Qi, Xinhong Hei, Hai Jin, Yun Yang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

In an edge storage system, popular data can be stored on edge servers to enable low-latency data retrieval for nearby users. Suffering from constrained storage capacities, edge servers must process users' data requests collaboratively. For sourcing data, it is essential to find out which edge servers in the system have the requested data. In this paper, we make the first attempt to study this edge data query (EDQ) problem and present EDIndex, a distributed Edge Data Indexing system to enable fast data queries at the edge. First, we introduce a new index structure named Counting Bloom Filter (CBF) tree for facilitating edge data queries. Then, to improve query performance, we enhance EDIndex with a novel index structure named hierarchical Counting Bloom Filter (HCBF) tree. In EDIndex, each edge server maintains an HCBF tree that indexes the data stored on nearby edge servers to facilitate data sourcing between edge servers at the edge. The results of extensive experiments conducted on an edge storage system comprised of 90 edge servers demonstrate that EDIndex 1) takes up to 8.8x less time to answer edge data queries compared with state-of-the-art edge indexing systems; and 2) can be implemented in practice with a high query accuracy at low initialization and maintenance overheads.
A Consumer Compensation System in Ride-hailing Service
Authors: Zhe Yu, Chi Xia, Shaosheng Cao, Lin Zhou, Haibin Huang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

In the ride-hailing business, compensation is mostly used to motivate consumers to place more orders and grow the market scale. However, most of the previous studies focus on car-hailing services. Few works investigate localized smart transportation innovations, such as intra-city freight logistics and designated driving. In addition, satisfying consumer fairness and improving consumer surplus, with the objective of maximizing revenue, are also important. In this paper, we propose a consumer compensation system, where a transfer learning enhanced uplift modeling is designed to measure the elasticity, and a model predictive control based optimization is formulated to control the budget accurately. Our implementation is effective and can keep the online environment lightweight. The proposed system has been deployed in the production environment of the real-world ride-hailing platform for 300 days, which outperforms the expert strategy by using 0.5% less subsidy and achieving 14.4% more revenue.
Learning to Ask Clarification Questions with Spatial Reasoning
Authors: Yang Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Wai Lam
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Asking clarifying questions has become a key element of various conversational systems, allowing for an effective resolution of ambiguity and uncertainty through natural language questions. Despite the extensive applications of spatial information grounded dialogues, it remains an understudied area on learning to ask clarification questions with the capability of spatial reasoning. In this work, we propose a novel method, named SpatialCQ, for this problem. Specifically, we first align the representation space between textual and spatial information by encoding spatial states with textual descriptions. Then a multi-relational graph is constructed to capture the spatial relations and enable spatial reasoning with relational graph attention networks. Finally, a unified encoder is adopted to fuse the multimodal information for asking clarification questions. Experimental results on the latest IGLU dataset show the superiority of the proposed method over existing approaches.
Implicit Query Parsing at Amazon Product Search
Authors: Chen Luo, Rahul Goutam, Haiyang Zhang, Chao Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Bing Yin
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Query Parsing aims to extract product attributes, such as color, brand, and product type, from search queries. These attributes play a crucial role in search engines for tasks such as matching, ranking, and recommendation. There are two types of attributes: explicit attributes that are mentioned explicitly in the search query, and implicit attributes that are mentioned implicitly. Existing works on query parsing do not differentiate between explicit query parsing and implicit query parsing, which limits their performance in product search engines. In this work, we demonstrate the critical importance of implicit attributes in real-world product search engines. We then present our solution for implicit query parsing at Amazon Search, which is a unified framework combining recent advancements in knowledge graph technologies and customer behavior analysis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal through offline experiments on Amazon search log data. We also show how to deploy and use the framework on Amazon search to improve customers' shopping experiences.
Learn from Relational Correlations and Periodic Events for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Authors: Ke Liang, Lingyuan Meng, Meng Liu, Yue Liu, Wenxuan Tu, Siwei Wang, Sihang Zhou, Xinwang Liu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Reasoning on temporal knowledge graphs (TKGR), aiming to infer missing events along the timeline, has been widely studied to alleviate incompleteness issues in TKG, which is composed of a series of KG snapshots at different timestamps. Two types of information, i.e., intra-snapshot structural information and inter-snapshot temporal interactions, mainly contribute to the learned representations for reasoning in previous models. However, these models fail to leverage (1) semantic correlations between relationships for the former information and (2) the periodic temporal patterns along the timeline for the latter one. Thus, such insufficient mining manners hinder expressive ability, leading to sub-optimal performances. To address these limitations, we propose a novel reasoning model, termed RPC, which sufficiently mines the information underlying the Relational correlations and Periodic patterns via two novel Correspondence units, i.e., relational correspondence unit (RCU) and periodic correspondence unit (PCU). Concretely, relational graph convolutional network (RGCN) and RCU are used to encode the intra-snapshot graph structural information for entities and relations, respectively. Besides, the gated recurrent units (GRU) and PCU are designed for sequential and periodic inter-snapshot temporal interactions, separately. Moreover, the model-agnostic time vectors are generated by time2vector encoders to guide the time-dependent decoder for fact scoring. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show that RPC outperforms the state-of-the-art TKGR models, and also demonstrate the effectiveness of two novel strategies in our model.
NC2T: Novel Curriculum Learning Approaches for Cross-Prompt Trait Scoring
Authors: Yejin Lee, Seokwon Jeong, Hongjin Kim, Tae-il Kim, Sung-Won Choi, Harksoo Kim
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Automated essay scoring (AES) is a crucial research area with potential applications in education and beyond. However, recent studies have primarily focused on AES models that evaluate essays within a specific domain or using a holistic score, leaving a gap in research and resources for more generalized models capable of assessing essays with detailed items from multiple perspectives. As evaluating and scoring essays based on complex traits is costly and time-consuming, datasets for such AES evaluations are limited. To address these issues, we developed a cross-prompt trait scoring AES model and proposed a suitable curriculum learning (CL) design. By devising difficulty scores and introducing the key curriculum method, we demonstrated its effectiveness compared to existing CL strategies in natural language understanding tasks.
Extending Label Aggregation Models with a Gaussian Process to Denoise Crowdsourcing Labels
Authors: Dan Li, Maarten de Rijke
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Label aggregation (LA) is the task of inferring a high-quality label for an example from multiple noisy labels generated by either human annotators or model predictions. Existing work on LA assumes a label generation process and designs a probabilistic graphical model (PGM) to learn latent true labels from observed crowd labels. However, the performance of PGM-based LA models is easily affected by the noise of the crowd labels. As a consequence, the performance of LA models differs on different datasets and no single LA model outperforms the rest on all datasets. We extend PGM-based LA models by integrating a GP prior on the true labels. The advantage of LA models extended with a GP prior is that they can take as input crowd labels, example features, and existing pre-trained label prediction models to infer the true labels, while the original LA can only leverage crowd labels. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets show that any LA models extended with a GP prior and a suitable mean function achieves better performance than the underlying LA models, demonstrating the effectiveness of using a GP prior.
Towards Trustworthy Recommender System: A Faithful and Responsible Recommendation Perspective
Authors: Yang Zhang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Recommender systems (RecSys) become increasingly prevalent in modern society, offering personalized information filtering to alleviate information overload and significantly impacting various human online activities. Machine learning-based recommendation methods have been extensively developed in recent years to achieve more accurate recommendations, with some of these approaches having been extensively deployed in industrial applications, such as the Deep Interest Network (DIN). Despite their widespread use, researchers and practitioners have highlighted various trustworthiness issues inherent in these systems, including bias and promoting polarization issues. In order to better serve users and comply with regulations pertaining to recommendation algorithms established by different countries, it is essential to consider the trustworthiness issues of recommender systems. This research focuses on trustworthiness in recommendation from two perspectives of user-centered principles: faithfulness and responsibility. On the one hand, collected recommendation data may not faithfully reflect user preferences, especially those of the service stage, due to bias[2, 3] and temporal effects,[4,5]etc. Achieving faithful recommendations with such data is crucial to ensure user satisfaction, i.e., making recommendations faithfully reflect user preferences during the testing. On the other hand, recommender systems could not only cater to user preferences [1] but also unconsciously and unintentionally affect (or even manipulate) user preferences. In the recommendation process, controlling the influence of recommender systems, such as avoiding potential opinion polarization, to provide responsible recommendations is also an important aspect of building trustworthy recommender systems. Consequently, there raise four research questions on the two aspects: RQ1: How can we model genuine user preferences when training data fails to faithfully reflect the user's current preferences? RQ2: How can we ensure that recommender models faithfully match the user's future preferences? RQ3: How can we quantify and evaluate the impact of a recommender system on user preferences? RQ4: How can we control the impact of a recommender system on user preferences to avoid negative side effects? Our objective is to achieve faithful and responsible recommendations for users while addressing these research questions. We attribute unfaithful recommendation to the discrepancies between the training data and the service objectives, which we formulate as different data shift problems (RQ1 and RQ2). We provide systematic analyses for these data shift problems from causal perspectives and develop several causality-inspired solutions to enhance recommendation faithfulness. In pursuit of responsible recommendations, we investigate the effect of recommender systems on users from a causal perspective. We develop a causal effect evaluation and adjustment framework to quantify and control the influence of recommender systems on user preferences (RQ3 and RQ4).
FairUP: A Framework for Fairness Analysis of Graph Neural Network-Based User Profiling Models
Authors: Mohamed Abdelrazek, Erasmo Purificato, Ludovico Boratto, Ernesto William De Luca
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Modern user profiling approaches capture different forms of interactions with the data, from user-item to user-user relationships. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a natural way to model these behaviours and build efficient and effective user profiles. However, each GNN-based user profiling approach has its own way of processing information, thus creating heterogeneity that does not favour the benchmarking of these techniques. To overcome this issue, we present FairUP, a framework that standardises the input needed to run three state-of-the-art GNN-based models for user profiling tasks. Moreover, given the importance that algorithmic fairness is getting in the evaluation of machine learning systems, FairUP includes two additional components to (1) analyse pre-processing and post-processing fairness and (2) mitigate the potential presence of unfairness in the original datasets through three pre-processing debiasing techniques. The framework, while extensible in multiple directions, in its first version, allows the user to conduct experiments on four real-world datasets. The source code is available at https://link.erasmopurif.com/FairUP-source-code, and the web application is available at https://link.erasmopurif.com/FairUP.
LAPCA: Language-Agnostic Pretraining with Cross-Lingual Alignment
Authors: Dmitry Abulkhanov, Nikita Sorokin, Sergey I. Nikolenko, Valentin Malykh
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Data collection and mining is a crucial bottleneck for cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). While previous works used machine translation and iterative training, we present a novel approach to cross-lingual pretraining called LAPCA (language-agnostic pretraining with cross-lingual alignment). We train the LAPCA-LM model based on XLM-RoBERTa and łexa that significantly improves cross-lingual knowledge transfer for question answering and sentence retrieval on, e.g., XOR-TyDi and Mr. TyDi datasets, and in the zero-shot cross-lingual scenario performs on par with supervised methods, outperforming many of them on MKQA.
DECAF: A Modular and Extensible Conversational Search Framework
Authors: Marco Alessio, Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

The Conversational Search (CS) paradigm allows for an intuitive interaction between the user and the system through natural language sentences and it is increasingly being adopted in various scenarios. However, its widespread experimentation has led to the birth of a multitude of conversational search systems with custom implementations and variants of information retrieval models. This exacerbates the reproducibility crisis already observed in several research areas, including Information Retrieval (IR). To address this issue, we propose DECAF: a modular and extensible conversational search framework designed for fast prototyping and development of conversational agents. Our framework integrates all the components that characterize a modern conversational search system and allows for the seamless integration of Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs)-based techniques. Furthermore, thanks to its uniform interface, DECAF allows for experiments characterized by a high degree of reproducibility. DECAF contains several state-of-the-art components including query rewriting, search functions under BoW and dense paradigms, and re-ranking functions. Our framework is tested on two well-known conversational collections: TREC CAsT 2019 and TREC CAsT 2020 and the results can be used by future practitioners as baselines. Our contributions include the identification of a series of state-of-the-art components for the conversational search task and the definition of a modular framework for its implementation.
Tahaqqaq: A Real-Time System for Assisting Twitter Users in Arabic Claim Verification
Authors: Zien Sheikh Ali, Watheq Mansour, Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, Tamer Elsayed, Abdulaziz Al-Ali
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2023

Over the past years, notable progress has been made towards fighting misinformation spread over social media, encouraging the development of many fact-checking systems. However, systems that operate over Arabic content are scarce. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing Tahaqqaq (Verify), an Arabic real-time system that helps users verify claims over Twitter with several functionalities, such as identifying check-worthy claims, estimating credibility of users in terms of spreading fake news, and finding authoritative accounts. Tahaqqaq has a friendly online Web interface that supports various real-time user scenarios. In the same breath, we enable public access to Tahaqqaq services through a handy RESTful API. Finally, in terms of performance, multiple components of Tahaqqaq outperform the state-of-the-art models on Arabic datasets.