OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Are Taylor's Posts Risky? Evaluating Cumulative Revelations in Online Personal Data: A persona-based tool for evaluating awareness of online risks and harms
Authors: Leif Azzopardi, Jo Briggs, Melissa Duheric, Callum Nash, Emma Nicol, Wendy Moncur, Burkhard Schafer
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Searching for people online is a common search task that most of us have performed at some point or other. With so much information about people available online it is often amazing what one can find out about someone else -- especially when information taken from different sources is pieced together to create a more detailed picture of the individual, and then used to make inferences about them (leading to cumulative revelations ). As such, the relevance of one piece of information is often conditional and dependent on other pieces of information found. This creates interesting and novel challenges in evaluating informationrelevance when searching personal profiles, posts and related information about an individual, as well as the potential risks that can arise from such revelations. In this demonstration paper, we present a tool designed to investigate how people assess and judge the relevance and potential risks ofsmall, apparently innocuous pieces of information associated with fictitious personas, such as Taylor Addison, when searching and browsing online profiles and social media. The demonstrator also comprises a cyber-safety tool, which aims to provide education and raise awareness of the potential risks of cumulative revelations. It does so by engaging participants in different scenarios where the relevance of individual information items depends on the searcher and their particular underlying motivation.
Unifying Cross-lingual Summarization and Machine Translation with Compression Rate
Authors: Yu Bai, Heyan Huang, Kai Fan, Yang Gao, Yiming Zhu, Jiaao Zhan, Zewen Chi, Boxing Chen
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) is a task that extracts important information from a source document and summarizes it into a summary in another language. It is a challenging task that requires a system to understand, summarize, and translate at the same time, making it highly related to Monolingual Summarization (MS) and Machine Translation (MT). In practice, the training resources for Machine Translation are far more than that for cross-lingual and monolingual summarization. Thus incorporating the Machine Translation corpus into CLS would be beneficial for its performance. However, the present work only leverages a simple multi-task framework to bring Machine Translation in, lacking deeper exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Cross-lingual Summarization with Compression rate (CSC), to benefit Cross-Lingual Summarization by large-scale Machine Translation corpus. Through introducing compression rate, the information ratio between the source and the target text, we regard the MT task as a special CLS task with a compression rate of 100%. Hence they can be trained as a unified task, sharing knowledge more effectively. However, a huge gap exists between the MT task and the CLS task, where samples with compression rates between 30% and 90% are extremely rare. Hence, to bridge these two tasks smoothly, we propose an effective data augmentation method to produce document-summary pairs with different compression rates. The proposed method not only improves the performance of the CLS task, but also provides controllability to generate summaries in desired lengths. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms various strong baselines in three cross-lingual summarization datasets. We released our code and data at https://github.com/ybai-nlp/CLS_CR.
Post Processing Recommender Systems with Knowledge Graphs for Recency, Popularity, and Diversity of Explanations
Authors: Giacomo Balloccu, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Existing explainable recommender systems have mainly modeled relationships between recommended and already experienced products, and shaped explanation types accordingly (e.g., movie "x" starred by actress "y" recommended to a user because that user watched other movies with "y" as an actress). However, none of these systems has investigated the extent to which properties of a single explanation (e.g., the recency of interaction with that actress) and of a group of explanations for a recommended list (e.g., the diversity of the explanation types) can influence the perceived explaination quality. In this paper, we conceptualized three novel properties that model the quality of the explanations (linking interaction recency, shared entity popularity, and explanation type diversity) and proposed re-ranking approaches able to optimize for these properties. Experiments on two public data sets showed that our approaches can increase explanation quality according to the proposed properties, fairly across demographic groups, while preserving recommendation utility. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/giacoballoccu/explanation-quality-recsys.
Modern Baselines for SPARQL Semantic Parsing
Authors: Debayan Banerjee, Pranav Ajit Nair, Jivat Neet Kaur, Ricardo Usbeck, Chris Biemann
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

In this work, we focus on the task of generating SPARQL queries from natural language questions, which can then be executed on Knowledge Graphs (KGs). We assume that gold entity and relations have been provided, and the remaining task is to arrange them in the right order along with SPARQL vocabulary, and input tokens to produce the correct SPARQL query. Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have not been explored in depth on this task so far, so we experiment with BART, T5 and PGNs (Pointer Generator Networks) with BERT embeddings, looking for new baselines in the PLM era for this task, on DBpedia and Wikidata KGs. We show that T5 requires special input tokenisation, but produces state of the art performance on LC-QuAD 1.0 and LC-QuAD 2.0 datasets, and outperforms task-specific models from previous works. Moreover, the methods enable semantic parsing for questions where a part of the input needs to be copied to the output query, thus enabling a new paradigm in KG semantic parsing.
Improving Efficiency and Robustness of Transformer-based Information Retrieval Systems
Authors: Edmon Begoli, Sudarshan Srinivasan, Maria Mahbub
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

This tutorial focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of improving the efficiency and robustness of transformer-based approaches, so that these can be effectively used in practical, high-scale, and high-volume information retrieval (IR) scenarios. The tutorial is inspired and informed by our work and experience while working with massive narrative datasets (8.5 billion medical notes), and by our basic research and academic experience with transformer-based IR tasks. Additionally, the tutorial focuses on techniques for making transformer-based IR robust against adversarial (AI) exploitation. This is a recent concern in the IR domain that we needed to take into concern, and we want to want to share some of the lessons learned and applicable principles with our audience. Finally, an important, if not critical, element of this tutorial is its focus on didacticism -- delivering tutorial content in a clear, intuitive, plain-speak fashion. Transformers are a challenging subject, and, through our teaching experience, we observed a great value and a great need to explain all relevant aspects of this architecture and related principles in the most straightforward, precise, and intuitive manner. That is the defining style of our proposed tutorial.
Gender Fairness in Information Retrieval Systems
Authors: Amin Bigdeli, Negar Arabzadeh, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Recent studies have shown that it is possible for stereotypical gender biases to find their way into representational and algorithmic aspects of retrieval methods; hence, exhibit themselves in retrieval outcomes. In this tutorial, we inform the audience of various studies that have systematically reported the presence of stereotypical gender biases in Information Retrieval (IR) systems. We further classify existing work on gender biases in IR systems as being related to (1) relevance judgement datasets, (2) structure of retrieval methods, and (3) representations learnt for queries and documents. We present how each of these components can be impacted by or cause intensified biases during retrieval. Based on these identified issues, we then present a collection of approaches from the literature that have discussed how such biases can be measured, controlled, or mitigated. Additionally, we introduce publicly available datasets that are often used for investigating gender biases in IR systems as well as evaluation methodology adopted for determining the utility of gender bias mitigation strategies.
Counterfactual Learning To Rank for Utility-Maximizing Query Autocompletion
Authors: Adam Block, Rahul Kidambi, Daniel N. Hill, Thorsten Joachims, Inderjit S. Dhillon
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the current information retrieval system, meaning that any query autocompletion methods trained to mimic user behavior can lead to suboptimal query suggestions. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new approach that explicitly optimizes the query suggestions for downstream retrieval performance. We formulate this as a problem of ranking a set of rankings, where each query suggestion is represented by the downstream item ranking it produces. We then present a learning method that ranks query suggestions by the quality of their item rankings. The algorithm is based on a counterfactual learning approach that is able to leverage feedback on the items (e.g., clicks, purchases) to evaluate query suggestions through an unbiased estimator, thus avoiding the assumption that users write or select optimal queries. We establish theoretical support for the proposed approach and provide learning-theoretic guarantees. We also present empirical results on publicly available datasets, and demonstrate real-world applicability using data from an online shopping store.
A Non-Factoid Question-Answering Taxonomy
Authors: Valeria Bolotova, Vladislav Blinov, Falk Scholer, W. Bruce Croft, Mark Sanderson
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Non-factoid question answering (NFQA) is a challenging and under-researched task that requires constructing long-form answers, such as explanations or opinions, to open-ended non-factoid questions - NFQs. There is still little understanding of the categories of NFQs that people tend to ask, what form of answers they expect to see in return, and what the key research challenges of each category are. This work presents the first comprehensive taxonomy of NFQ categories and the expected structure of answers. The taxonomy was constructed with a transparent methodology and extensively evaluated via crowdsourcing. The most challenging categories were identified through an editorial user study. We also release a dataset of categorised NFQs and a question category classifier. Finally, we conduct a quantitative analysis of the distribution of question categories using major NFQA datasets, showing that the NFQ categories that are the most challenging for current NFQA systems are poorly represented in these datasets. This imbalance may lead to insufficient system performance for challenging categories. The new taxonomy, along with the category classifier, will aid research in the area, helping to create more balanced benchmarks and to focus models on addressing specific categories.
Tensor-based Graph Modularity for Text Data Clustering
Authors: Rafika Boutalbi, Mira Ait Saada, Anastasiia Iurshina, Steffen Staab, Mohamed Nadif
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Graphs are used in several applications to represent similarities between instances. For text data, we can represent texts by different features such as bag-of-words, static embeddings (Word2vec, GloVe, etc.), and contextual embeddings (BERT, RoBERTa, etc.), leading to multiple similarities (or graphs) based on each representation. The proposal posits that incorporating the local invariance within every graph and the consistency across different graphs leads to a consensus clustering that improves the document clustering. This problem is complex and challenged with the sparsity and the noisy data included in each graph. To this end, we rely on the modularity metric, which effectively evaluates graph clustering in such circumstances. Therefore, we present a novel approach for text clustering based on both a sparse tensor representation and graph modularity. This leads to cluster texts (nodes) while capturing information arising from the different graphs. We iteratively maximize a Tensor-based Graph Modularity criterion. Extensive experiments on benchmark text clustering datasets are performed, showing that the proposed algorithm referred to as Tensor Graph Modularity -TGM- outperforms other baseline methods in terms of clustering task. The source code is available at https://github.com/TGMclustering/TGMclustering.
ir_metadata: An Extensible Metadata Schema for IR Experiments
Authors: Timo Breuer, Jüri Keller, Philipp Schaer
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

The information retrieval (IR) community has a strong tradition of making the computational artifacts and resources available for future reuse, allowing the validation of experimental results. Besides the actual test collections, the underlying run files are often hosted in data archives as part of conferences like TREC, CLEF, or NTCIR. Unfortunately, the run data itself does not provide much information about the underlying experiment. For instance, the single run file is not of much use without the context of the shared task's website or the run data archive. In other domains, like the social sciences, it is good practice to annotate research data with metadata. In this work, we introduce \textttir\_metadata - an extensible metadata schema for TREC run files based on the PRIMAD model. We propose to align the metadata annotations to PRIMAD, which considers components of computational experiments that can affect reproducibility. Furthermore, we outline important components and information that should be reported in the metadata and give evidence from the literature. To demonstrate the usefulness of these metadata annotations, we implement new features in \textttrepro\_eval that support the outlined metadata schema for the use case of reproducibility studies. Additionally, we curate a dataset with run files derived from experiments with different instantiations of PRIMAD components and annotate these with the corresponding metadata. In the experiments, we cover reproducibility experiments that are identified by the metadata and classified by PRIMAD. With this work, we enable IR researchers to annotate TREC run files and improve the reuse value of experimental artifacts even further.
ReNeuIR: Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval
Authors: Sebastian Bruch, Claudio Lucchese, Franco Maria Nardini
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Perhaps the applied nature of information retrieval research goes some way to explain the community's rich history of evaluating machine learning models holistically, understanding that efficacy matters but so does the computational cost incurred to achieve it. This is evidenced, for example, by more than a decade of research on efficient training and inference of large decision forest models in learning-to-rank. As the community adopts even more complex, neural network-based models in a wide range of applications, questions on efficiency have once again become relevant. We propose this workshop as a forum for a critical discussion of efficiency in the era of neural information retrieval, to encourage debate on the current state and future directions of research in this space, and to promote more sustainable research by identifying best practices in the development and evaluation of neural models for information retrieval.
What the Actual...Examining User Behaviour in Information Retrieval
Authors: George Buchanan, Dana McKay
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Conducting studies involving actual users is a recurring challenge in information retrieval. In this tutorial we will address the main strategic and tactical choices for engaging with, designing and executing user studies, considering both evaluation and formative investigation. The tension between reproducibility and ensuring natural user behaviour will be a recurring focus, seeking to help individual researchers make an intentional and well-argued choice for their research. The presenters have over fifty years of combined experience working in interactive information retrieval, and information interaction in general.
PEVAE: A Hierarchical VAE for Personalized Explainable Recommendation
Authors: Zefeng Cai, Zerui Cai
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely applied in recommendations. One reason is that their amortized inferences are beneficial for overcoming the data sparsity. However, in explainable recommendation that generates natural language explanations, they are still rarely explored. Thus, we aim to extend VAE to explainable recommendation. In this task, we find that VAE can generate acceptable explanations for users with few relevant training samples, however, it tends to generate less personalized explanations for users with relatively sufficient samples than autoencoders (AEs). We conjecture that information shared by different users in VAE disturbs the information for a specific user. To deal with this problem, we present PErsonalized VAE (PEVAE) that generates personalized natural language explanations for explainable recommendation. Moreover, we propose two novel mechanisms to aid our model in generating more personalized explanations, including 1) Self-Adaption Fusion (SAF) manipulates the latent space in a self-adaption manner for controlling the influence of shared information. In this way, our model can enjoy the advantage of overcoming the sparsity of data while generating more personalized explanations for a user with relatively sufficient training samples. 2) DEpendence Maximization (DEM) strengthens dependence between recommendations and explanations by maximizing the mutual information. It makes the explanation more specific to the input user-item pair and thus improves the personalization of the generated explanations. Extensive experiments show PEVAE can generate more personalized explanations and further analyses demonstrate the practical effect of our proposed methods.
ReLoop: A Self-Correction Continual Learning Loop for Recommender Systems
Authors: Guohao Cai, Jieming Zhu, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xiuqiang He, Ruiming Tang, Rui Zhang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Deep learning-based recommendation has become a widely adopted technique in various online applications. Typically, a deployed model undergoes frequent re-training to capture users' dynamic behaviors from newly collected interaction logs. However, the current model training process only acquires users' feedbacks as labels, but fails to take into account the errors made in previous recommendations. Inspired by the intuition that humans usually reflect and learn from mistakes, in this paper, we attempt to build a self-correction continual learning loop (dubbed ReLoop) for recommender systems. In particular, a new customized loss is employed to encourage every new model version to reduce prediction errors over the previous model version during training. Our ReLoop learning framework enables a continual self-correction process in the long run and thus is expected to obtain better performance over existing training strategies. Both offline experiments and an online A/B test have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of ReLoop.
Item Similarity Mining for Multi-Market Recommendation
Authors: Jiangxia Cao, Xin Cong, Tingwen Liu, Bin Wang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Real-world web applications such as Amazon and Netflix often provide services in multiple countries and regions (i.e., markets) around the world. Generally, different markets share similar item sets while containing different amounts of interaction data. Some markets are data-scarce and others are data-rich and leveraging those data from similar and data-rich auxiliary markets could enhance the data-scarce markets. In this paper, we explore multi-market recommendation (MMR), and propose a novel model called M$^3$Rec to improve all markets recommendation simultaneously. Since items play the role to bridge different markets, we argue that mining the similarities among items is the key point of MMR. Our M^3Rec preprocess two global item similarities: intra- and inter- market similarities. Specifically, we first learn the second-order intra-market similarity by adopting linear models with closed-form solutions, and then capture the high-order inter-market similarity by the random walk. Afterward, we incorporate the global item similarities for each local market. We conduct extensive experiments on five public available markets and compare with several state-of-the-art methods. Detailed experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
DisenCDR: Learning Disentangled Representations for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Jiangxia Cao, Xixun Lin, Xin Cong, Jing Ya, Tingwen Liu, Bin Wang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2022

Data sparsity is a long-standing problem in recommender systems. To alleviate it, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has attracted a surge of interests, which utilizes the rich user-item interaction information from the related source domain to improve the performance on the sparse target domain. Recent CDR approaches pay attention to aggregating the source domain information to generate better user representations for the target domain. However, they focus on designing more powerful interaction encoders to learn both domains simultaneously, but fail to model different user preferences of different domains. Particularly, domain-specific preferences of the source domain usually provide useless information to enhance the performance in the target domain, and directly aggregating the domain-shared and domain-specific information together maybe hurts target domain performance. This work considers a key challenge of CDR: How do we transfer shared information across domains? Grounded in the information theory, we propose DisenCDR, a novel model to disentangle the domain-shared and domain-specific information. To reach our goal, we propose two mutual-information-based disentanglement regularizers. Specifically, an exclusive regularizer aims to enforce the user domain-shared representations and domain-specific representations encoding exclusive information. An information regularizer is to encourage the user domain-shared representations encoding predictive information for both domains. Based on them, we further derive a tractable bound of our disentanglement objective to learn desirable disentangled representations. Extensive experiments show that DisenCDR achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on four real-world datasets.