OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cluster-Based Bandits: Fast Cold-Start for Recommender System New Users
Authors: Sulthana Shams, Daron Anderson, Douglas J. Leith
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

How to quickly and reliably learn the preferences of new users remains a key challenge in the design of recommender systems. In this paper we introduce a new type of online learning algorithm, cluster-based bandits, to address this challenge. This exploits the fact that users can often be grouped into clusters based on the similarity of their preferences, and this allows accelerated learning of new user preferences since the task becomes one of identifying which cluster a user belongs to and typically there are far fewer clusters than there are items to be rated. Clustering by itself is not enough however. Intra-cluster variability between users can be thought of as adding noise to user ratings. Deterministic methods such as decision-trees perform poorly in the presence of such noise. We identify so-called distinguisher items that are particularly informative for deciding which cluster a new user belongs to despite the rating noise. Using these items the cluster-based bandit algorithm is able to efficiently adapt to user responses and rapidly learn the correct cluster to assign to a new user.
Window Navigation with Adaptive Probing for Executing BlockMax WAND
Authors: Jinjin Shao, Yifan Qiao, Shiyu Ji, Tao Yang 0009
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

BlockMax WAND (BMW) and its variants can effectively prune low-scoring documents for fast top-k disjunctive query processing. This paper studies a boosting approach that further accelerates document retrieval by executing BMW, or one of its variants, on a sequence of posting windows with an order prioritized to tighten the threshold bound earlier. This optimization could add benefits to safely eliminate more operations involved in posting block visitation and document score evaluation. This paper evaluates such index navigation for BMW and two of its variants.
Underestimation Refinement: A General Enhancement Strategy for Exploration in Recommendation Systems
Authors: Yuhai Song, Lu Wang 0031, Haoming Dang, Weiwei Zhou, Jing Guan, Xiwei Zhao, Changping Peng, Yongjun Bao, Jingping Shao
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction based on deep neural networks has made significant progress in recommendation systems. However, these methods often suffer from CTR underestimation due to insufficient impressions for long-tail items. When formalizing CTR prediction as a contextual bandit problem, exploration methods provide a natural solution addressing this issue. In this paper, we first benchmark state-of-the-art exploration methods in the recommendation system setting. We find that the combination of gradient-based uncertainty modeling and Thompson Sampling achieves a significant advantage. On the basis of the benchmark, we further propose a general enhancement strategy, Underestimation Refinement (UR), which explicitly incorporates the prior knowledge that insufficient impressions likely leads to CTR underestimation. This strategy is applicable to almost all the existing exploration methods. Experimental results validate UR's effectiveness, achieving consistent improvement across all baseline exploration methods.
LS-DST: Long and Sparse Dialogue State Tracking with Smart History Collector in Insurance Marketing
Authors: Liqiang Song, Mengqiu Yao, Ye Bi, Zhenyu Wu, Jianming Wang, Jing Xiao 0006, Juan Wen, Xin Yu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Different from traditional task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems, insurance agents aim to engage customers for helping them satisfy specific demands and emotional companionship. As a result, customer-to-agent dialogues are usually very long, and many turns of them are pure chit-chat without any useful marketing clues. This brings challenges to dialogue state tracking task in insurance marketing. To deal with these long and sparse dialogues, we propose a new dialogue state tracking architecture containing three components: dialogue encoder, Smart History Collector (SHC) and dialogue state classifier. SHC, a deliberately designed memory network, effectively selects relevant dialogue history via slot-attention, and then updates dialogue history memory. With SHC, our model is able to keep track of the vital information and filter out pure chit-chat. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LS-DST significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on real insurance dialogue dataset.
Modeling Intent Graph for Search Result Diversification
Authors: Zhan Su, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu 0001, Xubo Qin, Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Search result diversification aims to offer diverse documents that cover as many intents as possible. Most existing implicit diversification approaches model diversity through the similarity of document representation, which is indirect and unnatural. To handle the diversity more precisely, we measure the similarity of documents by their similarity of the intent coverage. Specifically, we build a classifier to judge whether two different documents contain the same intent based on the document's content. Then we construct an intent graph to present the complicated relationship of documents and the query. On the intent graph, documents are connected if they are similar, while the query and the document are gradually connected based on the document selection result. Then we employ graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to update the representation of the query and each document by aggregating its neighbors. By this means, we can obtain the context-aware query representation and the intent-aware document representations through the dynamic intent graph during the document selection process. Furthermore, these representations and intent graph features are fused into diversity features. Combined with the traditional relevance features, we obtain the final ranking score that balances the relevance and the diversity. Experimental results show that this implicit diversification model significantly outperforms all existing implicit diversification methods, and it can even beat the state-of-the-art explicit models.
Meta-Learned Specific Scenario Interest Network for User Preference Prediction
Authors: Yinan Sun, Kang Yin, Hehuan Liu, Si Li 0001, Yajing Xu, Jun Guo 0002
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

User preference prediction is a task of learning user interests through user-item interactions. Most existing studies capture user interests based on historical behaviors without considering specific scenario information. However, the users may have special interests in these specific scenarios and sometimes user historical behaviors are limited. In this paper, we propose a Meta-Learned Specific Scenario Interest Network (Meta-SSIN) to predict user preference of target item by capturing specific scenario interests. Meta-SSIN uses multiple independent meta-learning modules to model historical behaviors in each scenario. The independent module can capture special interests based on limited behaviors. Experimental results on three datasets show that Meta-SSIN outperforms compared state-of-the-art methods.
User-Centric Path Reasoning towards Explainable Recommendation
Authors: Chang-You Tai, Liang-Ying Huang, Chien-Kun Huang, Lun-Wei Ku
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

There has been significant progress in the utilization of heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KG) as auxiliary information in recommendation systems. Reasoning over KG paths sheds light on the user's decision-making process. Previous methods focus on formulating this process as a multi-hop reasoning problem. However, without some form of guidance in the reasoning process, such a huge search space results in poor accuracy and little explanation diversity. In this paper, we propose UCPR, a user-centric path reasoning network that constantly guides the search from the aspect of user demand and enables explainable recommendations. In this network, a multi-view structure leverages not only local sequence reasoning information but also a panoramic view of the user's demand portfolio while inferring subsequent user decision-making steps. Experiments on five real-world benchmarks show UCPR is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we show that the proposed model successfully identifies users' concerns and increases reason-ing diversity to enhance explainability
Retrieving Implicit Information for Stock Movement Prediction
Authors: Tsun-Hsien Tang, Chung-Chi Chen 0001, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Previous studies on the financial news focus mainly on the news articles explicitly mentioning the target financial instruments, and may suffer from data sparsity. As taking into consideration other related news, e.g., sector-related news, is a crucial part of real-world decision-making, we explore the use of news without explicit target mentions to enrich the information for the prediction model. We develop a neural network framework that jointly learns with a news selection mechanism to extract implicit information from the chaotic daily news pool. Our proposed model, called the news distilling network (NDN), takes advantage of neural representation learning and collaborative filtering to capture the relationship between stocks and news. With NDN, we learn latent stock and news representations to facilitate similarity measurements, and apply a gating mechanism to prevent noisy news representations from flowing to a higher level encoding stage, which encodes the selected news representation of each day. Extensive experiments on real-world stock market data demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and show improvements over previous techniques.
Cheap and Good? Simple and Effective Data Augmentation for Low Resource Machine Reading
Authors: Hoang Van, Vikas Yadav, Mihai Surdeanu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

We propose a simple and effective strategy for data augmentation for low-resource machine reading comprehension (MRC). Our approach first pretrains the answer extraction components of a MRC system on the augmented data that contains approximate context of the correct answers, before training it on the exact answer spans. The approximate context helps the QA method components in narrowing the location of the answers. We demonstrate that our simple strategy substantially improves both document retrieval and answer extraction performance by providing larger context of the answers and additional training data. In particular, our method significantly improves the performance of BERT based retriever (15.12%), and answer extractor (4.33% F1) on TechQA, a complex, low-resource MRC task. Further, our data augmentation strategy yields significant improvements of up to 3.9% exact match (EM) and 2.7% F1 for answer extraction on PolicyQA, another practical but moderate sized QA dataset that also contains long answer spans.
Advancements in the Music Information Retrieval Framework AMUSE over the Last Decade
Authors: Igor Vatolkin, Philipp Ginsel, Günter Rudolph
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

AMUSE (Advanced MUSic Explorer) was created 2006 as an open-source Java framework for various music information retrieval tasks like feature extraction, feature processing, classification, and evaluation. In contrast to toolboxes which focus on individual MIR-related algorithms, it is possible with AMUSE, for instance, to extract features with Librosa, process them based on events estimated by MIRtoolbox, classify with WEKA or Keras, and validate the models with own classification performance measures. We present several substantial contributions to AMUSE since its first presentation at ISMIR 2010. They include the annotation editor for single and multiple tracks, the support of multi-label and multi-class classification, and new plugins which operate with Keras, Librosa, and Sonic Annotator. Other integrated methods are the structural complexity processing, chord vector feature, aggregation of features around estimated onset events, and evaluation of time event extractors. Further advancements are a more flexible feature extraction with different parameters like frame sizes, possibility to integrate additional tasks beyond algorithms related to supervised classification, marking of features which can be ignored for a classification task, extension of algorithm parameters with external code (e.g., a structure of a Keras neural net), etc.
On the Quality of the TREC-COVID IR Test Collections
Authors: Ellen M. Voorhees, Kirk Roberts
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Shared text collections continue to be vital infrastructure for IR research. The COVID-19 pandemic offered an opportunity to create a test collection that captured the rapidly changing information space during a pandemic, and the TREC-COVID effort was created to build such a collection using the TREC framework. This paper examines the quality of the resulting TREC-COVID test collections, and in doing so, offers a critique of the state-of-the-art in building reusable IR test collections. The largest of the collections--called 'TREC-COVID Complete'--is found to be on par with previous TREC ad~hoc collections with existing quality tests uncovering no apparent problems. Yet the lack of any way to definitively demonstrate the collection's quality and its violation of previously used quality heuristics suggest much work remains to be done to understand the factors affecting collection quality.
Decoupling Representation Learning and Classification for GNN-based Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yanling Wang, Jing Zhang 0001, Shasha Guo 0002, Hongzhi Yin, Cuiping Li 0001, Hong Chen 0001
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

GNN-based anomaly detection has recently attracted considerable attention. Existing attempts have thus far focused on jointly learning the node representations and the classifier for detecting the anomalies. Inspired by the recent advances of self-supervised learning (SSL) on graphs, we explore another possibility of decoupling the node representation learning and the classification for anomaly detection. We conduct a preliminary study to show that decoupled training using existing graph SSL schemes to represent nodes can obtain performance gains over joint training, but it may deteriorate when the behavior patterns and the label semantics become highly inconsistent. To be less biased by the inconsistency, we propose a simple yet effective graph SSL scheme, called Deep Cluster Infomax (DCI) for node representation learning, which captures the intrinsic graph properties in more concentrated feature spaces by clustering the entire graph into multiple parts. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets for anomaly detection. The results demonstrate that decoupled training equipped with a proper SSL scheme can outperform joint training in AUC. Compared with existing graph SSL schemes, DCI can help decoupled training gain more improvements.
Interactive Information Retrieval with Bandit Feedback
Authors: Huazheng Wang, Yiling Jia, Hongning Wang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Information retrieval (IR) in nature is a process of sequential decision making. The system repeatedly interacts with the users to refine its understanding of the users' information needs, improve its estimation of result relevance, and thus increase the utility of its returned results (e.g., the result rankings). Distinct from traditional IR solutions that rigidly execute an offline trained policy, interactive information retrieval emphasizes online policy learning. This, however, is fundamentally difficult for at least three reasons. First, the system only collects user feedback on the presented results, aka, the bandit feedback. Second, users' feedback is known to be noisy and biased. Third, as a result, the system always faces the conflicting goals of improving its policy by presenting currently underestimated results to users versus satisfying the users by ranking the currently estimated best results on top.
CIFDM: Continual and Interactive Feature Distillation for Multi-Label Stream Learning
Authors: Yigong Wang, Zhuoyi Wang, Yu Lin 0002, Latifur Khan, Dingcheng Li
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Multi-label learning algorithms have attracted more and more attention as of recent. This is mainly because real-world data is generally associated with multiple and non-exclusive labels, which could correspond to different objects, scenes, actions, and attributes. In this paper, we consider the following challenging multi-label stream scenario: the new labels emerge continuously in the changing environments, and are assigned to the previous data. In this setting, data mining solutions must be able to learn the new concepts and avoid catastrophic forgetting simultaneously. We propose a novel continual and interactive feature distillation-based learning framework (CIFDM), to effectively classify instances with novel labels. We utilize the knowledge from the previous tasks to learn new knowledge to solve the current task. Then, the system compresses historical and novel knowledge and preserves it while waiting for new emerging tasks. CIFDM consists of three components: 1) a knowledge bank that stores the existing feature-level compressed knowledge, and predicts the observed labels so far; 2) a pioneer module that aims to learn and predict new emerged labels based on knowledge bank.; 3) an interactive knowledge compression function which is used to compress and transfer the new knowledge to the bank, and then apply the current compressed knowledge to initialize the label embedding of the pioneer for the next task.
News2PubMed: A Browser Extension for Linking Health News to Medical Literature
Authors: Jun Wang 0142, Bei Yu 0002
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

This demo system presents a browser extension that allows the reader of a health news article to quickly retrieve related medical/health research papers. This system can help news editors and readers fact-check health news for incorrect or exaggerated claims, such as making causal claims from correlational findings or inference of animal studies to humans. Linking health news to the original research papers is not a trivial task, as links are largely missing in science news reports. To link health news to medical literature, our system includes a new named-entity recognition function to extract journal names, and a new Elasticsearch-based search engine to incorporate rich metadata into the search strategy. This paper also introduces a new dataset for evaluating the performance of the proposed search system.
Targeted Attack and Defense for Deep Hashing
Authors: Xunguang Wang, Zheng Zhang 0006, Guangming Lu 0002, Yong Xu 0001
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

Deep hashing methods have been intensively studied and successfully applied in massive fast image retrieval. However, inherited from the deficiency of deep neural networks, deep hashing models can be easily fooled by adversarial examples, which brings a serious security risk to hashing based retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel targeted attack method and the first defense scheme for deep hashing based retrieval. Specifically, a simple yet effective PrototypeNet is designed to generate category-level semantic embedding (dubbed prototype code) regarded as the semantic representative of the target label, which preserves the semantic similarity with relevant labels and dissimilarity with irrelevant labels. Subsequently, we conduct the targeted attack by minimizing the Hamming distance between the hash code of the adversarial sample and the prototype code. Moreover, we provide an adversarial training algorithm to improve the adversarial robustness of deep hashing networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method can produce high-quality adversarial samples with the benefit of superior targeted attack performance over state-of-the-arts. Importantly, our adversarial defense framework can significantly boost the robustness of hashing networks against adversarial attacks on deep hashing based retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/xunguangwang/Targeted-Attack-and-Defense-for-Deep-Hashing.
OrgBox: Supporting Cognitive and Metacognitive Activities During Exploratory Search
Authors: Austin R. Ward, Robert Capra
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

We describe a search-assistance tool called the OrgBox, created to support users' organizational, cognitive, and metacognitive activities while performing exploratory search tasks. The OrgBox tool allows users to create and label "boxes" to organize information found during a search. The OrgBox was integrated with a custom built search system that allowed users to save, organize, and synthesize information using drag-and-drop actions. The OrgBox tool also encourages users to engage in metacognitive activities during their search process (e.g., planning their next steps, monitoring their progress, evaluating the information found so far). In this paper, we describe the features and implementation of the OrgBox tool. We also summarize result of two user studies conducted using the OrgBox that show its cognitive and metacognitive benefits to users.
Interacting with Information in Immersive Virtual Environments
Authors: Austin R. Ward, Yiyin Gu, Sandeep Avula, Praneeth Chakravarthula
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

In this paper, we demonstrate the Information Interactions in Virtual Reality (IIVR) system designed and implemented to study how users interact with abstract information objects in immersive virtual environments in the context of information retrieval. Virtual reality displays are quickly growing as social and personal computing media, and understanding user interactions in these immersive environments is imperative. As a step towards effective information retrieval in such emerging platforms, our system is central to upcoming studies to observe how users engage in information triaging tasks in Virtual Reality (VR). In these studies, we will observe the effects of (1) information layouts and (2) types of interactions in VR. We believe this early system motivates researchers in understanding and designing meaningful interactions for future VR information retrieval applications.
HONto: A Bottom-Up Knowledge Base from Textbooks for Recommending Contextually Relevant Documents
Authors: Sabine Wehnert
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2021

This research presents a recommender system designed on the basis of a bottom-up knowledge base from textbooks. While other ontologies that are usually applied to such tasks are hand-crafted, our automated approach is a possible answer to the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. We extract concept hierarchies from section titles and use co-occurrences in book sections as evidence for possible contextual relationships between the therein mentioned entities. Motivated by a legal use case of recommending upcoming changes in law, the design is targeting three major challenges: different abstraction levels between entities of legal documents and the parliament protocols announcing norm changes, as well as engineering an explainable retrieval mechanism using the knowledge base which can additionally offer decent usability despite a high-recall requirement. Although the system is developed for a specific legal use case, there are many aspects of general applicability in the fields of recommender systems, information retrieval and information extraction, entity resolution, explainable artificial intelligence and usability. We validate selected parts of the system design also on other applications, such as educational media research.