More Like this

1. Entity Retrieval Using Fine-Grained Entity Aspects

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3404835.3463035  

   Chatterjee, Shubham; Dietz, Laura (July 2021, Proceedings of The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR))

   null; null; null (Ed.)

   Using entity aspect links, we improve upon the current state-of-the-art in entity retrieval. Entity retrieval is the task of retrieving relevant entities for search queries, such as "Antibiotic Use In Livestock". Entity aspect linking is a new technique to refine the semantic information of entity links. For example, while passages relevant to the query above may mention the entity "USA", there are many aspects of the USA of which only few, such as "USA/Agriculture", are relevant for this query. By using entity aspect links that indicate which aspect of an entity is being referred to in the context of the query, we obtain more specific relevance indicators for entities. We show that our approach improves upon all baseline methods, including the current state-of-the-art using a standard entity retrieval test collection. With this work, we release a large collection of entity-aspect-links for a large TREC corpus. 

   more » « less
2. Iterative Relevance Feedback for Answer Passage Retrieval with Passage-Level Semantic Match

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15712-8_36  

   Bi, K. (April 2019, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 19))

   Relevance feedback techniques assume that users provide relevance judgments for the top k (usually 10) documents and then re-rank using a new query model based on those judgments. Even though this is effective, there has been little research recently on this topic because requiring users to provide substantial feedback on a result list is impractical in a typical web search scenario. In new environments such as voice-based search with smart home devices, however, feedback about result quality can potentially be obtained during users' interactions with the system. Since there are severe limitations on the length and number of results that can be presented in a single interaction in this environment, the focus should move from browsing result lists to iterative retrieval and from retrieving documents to retrieving answers. In this paper, we study iterative relevance feedback techniques with a focus on retrieving answer passages. We first show that iterative feedback can be at least as effective as the top-k approach on standard TREC collections, and more effective on answer passage collections. We then propose an iterative feedback model for answer passages based on semantic similarity at passage level and show that it can produce significant improvements compared to both word-based iterative feedback models and those based on term-level semantic similarity. 

   more » « less
3. ENT Rank: Retrieving Entities for Topical Information Needs through Entity-Neighbor-Text Relations

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3331184.3331257  

   Dietz, Laura (July 2019, Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval)

   Related work has demonstrated the helpfulness of utilizing information about entities in text retrieval; here we explore the converse: Utilizing information about text in entity retrieval. We model the relevance of Entity-Neighbor-Text (ENT) relations to derive a learning-to-rank-entities model. We focus on the task of retrieving (multiple) relevant entities in response to a topical information need such as "Zika fever". The ENT Rank model is designed to exploit semi-structured knowledge resources such as Wikipedia for entity retrieval. The ENT Rank model combines (1) established features of entity-relevance, with (2) information from neighboring entities (co-mentioned or mentioned-on-page) through (3) relevance scores of textual contexts through traditional retrieval models such as BM25 and RM3. 

   more » « less
4. Revisiting Iterative Relevance Feedback for Document and Passage Retrieval

   Bi, K.; Ai, Q.; and Croft, W. B. (July 2019, SIGIR Workshop on Conversational Interaction Systems (WCIS'19))

   As more and more search traffic comes from mobile phones, intelligent assistants, and smart-home devices, new challenges (e.g., limited presentation space) and opportunities come up in information retrieval. Previously, an effective technique, relevance feedback (RF), has rarely been used in real search scenarios due to the overhead of collecting users’ relevance judgments. However, since users tend to interact more with the search results shown on the new interfaces, it becomes feasible to obtain users’ assessments on a few results during each interaction. This makes iterative relevance feedback (IRF) techniques look promising today. IRF can deal with a simplified scenario of conversational search, where the system asks users to provide relevance feedback on results shown in the current iteration and shows more relevant results in the next interaction. IRF has not been studied systematically in the new search scenarios and its effectiveness is mostly unknown. In this paper, we re-visit IRF and extend it with RF models proposed in recent years. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze and compare IRF with the standard top-k RF framework on document and passage retrieval. Experimental results show that IRF is at least as effective as the standard top-k RF framework for documents and much more effective for passages. This indicates that IRF for passage retrieval has huge potential and is a promising direction for conversational search based on relevance feedback. 

   more » « less
5. Neural Entity Context Models

   Oza, Pooja; Chatterjee, Shubham; Dietz, Laura (December 2023, ACM)

   A prevalent approach of entity-oriented systems involves retrieving relevant entities by harnessing knowledge graph embeddings. These embeddings encode entity information in the context of the knowledge graph and are static in nature. Our goal is to generate entity embeddings that capture what renders them relevant for the query. This differs from entity embeddings constructed with static resource, for example, E-BERT. Previously, ~\citet{dalton2014entity} demonstrated the benefits obtained with the Entity Context Model, a pseudo-relevance feedback approach based on entity links in relevant contexts. In this work, we reinvent the Entity Context Model (ECM) for neural graph networks and incorporate pre-trained embeddings. We introduce three entity ranking models based on fundamental principles of ECM: (1) \acl{GAN}, (2) Simple Graph Relevance Networks, and (3) Graph Relevance Networks. \acl{GAN} and Graph Relevance Networks are the graph neural variants of ECM, that employ attention mechanism and relevance information of the relevant context respectively to ascertain entity relevance. Our experiments demonstrate that our neural variants of the ECM model significantly outperform the state-of-the-art BERT-ER ~\cite{10.1145/3477495.3531944} by more than 14\% and exceeds the performance of systems that use knowledge graph embeddings by over 101\%. Notably, our findings reveal that leveraging the relevance of the relevant context is more effective at identifying relevant entities than the attention mechanism. To evaluate the efficacy of the models, we conduct experiments on two standard benchmark datasets, DBpediaV2 and TREC Complex Answer Retrieval. To aid reproducibility, our code and data are available. https://github.com/TREMA-UNH/neural-entity-context-models 

   more » « less