More Like this

1. First-passage duality

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/aaddb3  

   Krapivsky, P L; Redner, S (September 2018, Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment)
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. Small ball probabilities for the passage time in planar first-passage percolation

   https://doi.org/10.1214/25-ECP699  

   Elboim, Dor (June 2025, Electronic Communications in Probability)
4. Humans Optional? Automatic Large-Scale Test Collections for Entity, Passage, and Entity-Passage Retrieval

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-020-00334-y  

   Dietz, Laura Dalton (March 2020, DatenbankSpektrum)

   Schaer, Philipp Berberich (Ed.)

   Manually creating test collections is a time-, effort-, and cost-intensive process. This paper describes a fully automatic alternative for deriving large-scale test collections, where no human assessments are needed. The empirical experiments confirm that automatic test collection and manual assessments agree on the best performing systems. The collection includes relevance judgments for both text passages and knowledge base entities. Since test collections with relevance data for both entity and text passages are rare, this approach provides a cost-efficient way for training and evaluating ad hoc passage retrieval, entity retrieval, and entity-aware text retrieval methods. 

   more » « less
5. First-passage-driven boundary recession

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8121/ac802f  

   De Bruyne, B; Randon-Furling, J; Redner, S (August 2022, Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical)

   Abstract We investigate a moving boundary problem for a Brownian particle on the semi-infinite line in which the boundary moves by a distance proportional to the time between successive collisions of the particle and the boundary. Phenomenologically rich dynamics arises. In particular, the probability for the particle to first reach the moving boundary for the n th time asymptotically scales as t − ( 1 + 2 − n ) . Because the tail of this distribution becomes progressively fatter, the typical time between successive first passages systematically gets longer. We also find that the number of collisions between the particle and the boundary scales as ln ln  t , while the time dependence of the boundary position varies as t /ln  t . 

   more » « less