To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or similar query patterns in the document. However, we argue that they are inherently based on local interactions and do not generalise to ubiquitous, non-consecutive contextual relationships.In this work, we propose a novel relevance matching model based on graph neural networks to leverage the document-level word relationships for ad-hoc retrieval. In addition to the local interactions, we explicitly incorporate all contexts of a term through the graph-of-word text format. Matching patterns can be revealed accordingly to provide a more accurate relevance score. Our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two ad-hoc benchmarks. We also experimentally compare our model with BERT and show our ad-vantages on long documents.
While the celebrated graph neural networks yield effective representations for individual nodes of a graph, there has been relatively less success in extending to the task of graph similarity learning. Recent work on graph similarity learning has considered either global-level graph-graph interactions or low-level node-node interactions, ignoring the rich cross-level interactions (e.g., between nodes of a graph and the other whole graph). In this paper, we propose a Multi-Level Graph Matching Network (MGMN) framework for computing the graph similarity between any pair of graph-structured objects in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed model MGMN consists of a node-graph matching network for effectively learning cross-level interactions between nodes of a graph and the other whole graph, and a siamese graph neural network to learn global-level interactions between two input graphs. Furthermore, to bridge the gap of the lack of standard graph similarity learning benchmarks, we have created and collected a set of datasets for both the graph-graph classification and graph-graph regression tasks with different sizes in order to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model MGMN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models one both the graph-graph classification and graph-graph regression tasks. Compared with previous work, MGMN also exhibits stronger robustness as the sizes of the two input graphs increase.
Getting relevant information from search engines has been the heart of research works in information retrieval. Query expansion is a retrieval technique that has been studied and proved to yield positive results in relevance. Users are required to express their queries as a shortlist of words, sentences, or questions. With this short format, a huge amount of information is lost in the process of translating the information need from the actual query size since the user cannot convey all his thoughts in a few words. This mostly leads to poor query representation which contributes to undesired retrieval effectiveness. This loss of information has made the study of query expansion technique a strong area of study. This research work focuses on two methods of retrieval for both tweet-length queries and sentence-length queries. Two algorithms have been proposed and the implementation is expected to produce a better relevance retrieval model than most state-the-art relevance models.
The ad-hoc retrieval task is to rank related documents given a query and a document collection. A series of deep learning based approaches have been proposed to solve such problem and gained lots of attention. However, we argue that they are inherently based on local word sequences, ignoring the subtle long-distance document-level word relationships. To solve the problem, we explicitly model the document-level word relationship through the graph structure, capturing the subtle information via graph neural networks. In addition, due to the complexity and scale of the document collections, it is considerable to explore the different grain-sized hierarchical matching signals at a more general level. Therefore, we propose a Graph-based Hierarchical Relevance Matching model (GHRM) for ad-hoc retrieval, by which we can capture the subtle and general hierarchical matching signals simultaneously. We validate the effects of GHRM over two representative ad-hoc retrieval benchmarks, the comprehensive experiments and results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.
Multi-label text classification refers to the problem of assigning each given document its most relevant labels from the label set. Commonly, the metadata of the given documents and the hierarchy of the labels are available in real-world applications. However, most existing studies focus on only modeling the text information, with a few attempts to utilize either metadata or hierarchy signals, but not both of them. In this paper, we bridge the gap by formalizing the problem of metadata-aware text classification in a large label hierarchy (e.g., with tens of thousands of labels). To address this problem, we present the MATCH solution -- an end-to-end framework that leverages both metadata and hierarchy information. To incorporate metadata, we pre-train the embeddings of text and metadata in the same space and also leverage the fully-connected attentions to capture the interrelations between them. To leverage the label hierarchy, we propose different ways to regularize the parameters and output probability of each child label by its parents. Extensive experiments on two massive text datasets with large-scale label hierarchies demonstrate the effectiveness of MATCH over state-of-the-art deep learning baselines.
Recently pre-trained language representation models such as BERT have shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream tasks including information retrieval (IR). However, pre-training objectives tailored for ad-hoc retrieval have not been well explored. In this paper, we propose Pre-training with Representative wOrds Prediction (PROP) for ad-hoc retrieval. PROP is inspired by the classical statistical language model for IR, specifically the query likelihood model, which assumes that the query is generated as the piece of text representative of the "ideal" document. Based on this idea, we construct the representative words prediction (ROP) task for pre-training. Given an input document, we sample a pair of word sets according to the document language model, where the set with higher likelihood is deemed as more representative of the document. We then pre-train the Transformer model to predict the pairwise preference between the two word sets, jointly with the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective. By further fine-tuning on a variety of representative downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, PROP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods. We also show that PROP can achieve exciting performance under both the zero- and low-resource IR settings. The code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/Albert-Ma/PROP.
We study learning of a matching model for response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The problem is equally important with designing the architecture of a model, but is less explored in existing literature. To learn a robust matching model from noisy training data, we propose a general co-teaching framework with three specific teaching strategies that cover both teaching with loss functions and teaching with data curriculum. Under the framework, we simultaneously learn two matching models with independent training sets. In each iteration, one model transfers the knowledge learned from its training set to the other model, and at the same time receives the guide from the other model on how to overcome noise in training. Through being both a teacher and a student, the two models learn from each other and get improved together. Evaluation results on two public data sets indicate that the proposed learning approach can generally and significantly improve the performance of existing matching models.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Previous cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment studies rely on entity embeddings derived only from monolingual KG structural information, which may fail at matching entities that have different facts in two KGs. In this paper, we introduce the topic entity graph, a local sub-graph of an entity, to represent entities with their contextual information in KG. From this view, the KB-alignment task can be formulated as a graph matching problem; and we further propose a graph-attention based solution, which first matches all entities in two topic entity graphs, and then jointly model the local matching information to derive a graph-level matching vector. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
We propose a method that can leverage unlabeled data to learn a matching model for response selection in retrieval-based chatbots. The method employs a sequence-to-sequence architecture (Seq2Seq) model as a weak annotator to judge the matching degree of unlabeled pairs, and then performs learning with both the weak signals and the unlabeled data. Experimental results on two public data sets indicate that matching models get significant improvements when they are learned with the proposed method.
Cross-modal information retrieval aims to find heterogeneous data of various modalities from a given query of one modality. The main challenge is to map different modalities into a common semantic space, in which distance between concepts in different modalities can be well modeled. For cross-modal information retrieval between images and texts, existing work mostly uses off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for image feature extraction. For texts, word-level features such as bag-of-words or word2vec are employed to build deep learning models to represent texts. Besides word-level semantics, the semantic relations between words are also informative but less explored. In this paper, we model texts by graphs using similarity measure based on word2vec. A dual-path neural network model is proposed for couple feature learning in cross-modal information retrieval. One path utilizes Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for text modeling based on graph representations. The other path uses a neural network with layers of nonlinearities for image modeling based on off-the-shelf features. The model is trained by a pairwise similarity loss function to maximize the similarity of relevant text-image pairs and minimize the similarity of irrelevant pairs. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly, with 17% improvement on accuracy for the best case.