Search engine has become a fundamental component in various web and mobile applications. Retrieving relevant documents from the massive datasets is challenging for a search engine system, especially when faced with verbose or tail queries. In this paper, we explore a vector space search framework for document retrieval. Specifically, we trained a deep semantic matching model so that each query and document can be encoded as a low dimensional embedding. Our model was trained based on BERT architecture. We deployed a fast k-nearest-neighbor index service for online serving. Both offline and online metrics demonstrate that our method improved retrieval performance and search quality considerably, particularly for tail
Search in social networks such as Facebook poses different challenges than in classical web search: besides the query text, it is important to take into account the searcher's context to provide relevant results. Their social graph is an integral part of this context and is a unique aspect of Facebook search. While embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has been applied in eb search engines for years, Facebook search was still mainly based on a Boolean matching model. In this paper, we discuss the techniques for applying EBR to a Facebook Search system. We introduce the unified embedding framework developed to model semantic embeddings for personalized search, and the system to serve embedding-based retrieval in a typical search system based on an inverted index. We discuss various tricks and experiences on end-to-end optimization of the whole system, including ANN parameter tuning and full-stack optimization. Finally, we present our progress on two selected advanced topics about modeling. We evaluated EBR on verticals for Facebook Search with significant metrics gains observed in online A/B experiments. We believe this paper will provide useful insights and experiences to help people on developing embedding-based retrieval systems in search engines.
Search personalization aims to tailor search results to each specific user based on the user's personal interests and preferences (i.e., the user profile). Recent research approaches to search personalization by modelling the potential 3-way relationship between the submitted query, the user and the search results (i.e., documents). That relationship is then used to personalize the search results to that user. In this paper, we introduce a novel embedding model based on capsule network, which recently is a breakthrough in deep learning, to model the 3-way relationships for search personalization. In the model, each user (submitted query or returned document) is embedded by a vector in the same vector space. The 3-way relationship is described as a triple of (query, user, document) which is then modeled as a 3-column matrix containing the three embedding vectors. After that, the 3-column matrix is fed into a deep learning architecture to re-rank the search results returned by a basis ranker. Experimental results on query logs from a commercial web search engine show that our model achieves better performances than the basis ranker as well as strong search personalization baselines.
In this paper, we analyze several neural network designs (and their variations) for sentence pair modeling and compare their performance extensively across eight datasets, including paraphrase identification, semantic textual similarity, natural language inference, and question answering tasks. Although most of these models have claimed state-of-the-art performance, the original papers often reported on only one or two selected datasets. We provide a systematic study and show that (i) encoding contextual information by LSTM and inter-sentence interactions are critical, (ii) Tree-LSTM does not help as much as previously claimed but surprisingly improves performance on Twitter datasets, (iii) the Enhanced Sequential Inference Model is the best so far for larger datasets, while the Pairwise Word Interaction Model achieves the best performance when less data is available. We release our implementations as an open-source toolkit.
For the challenging semantic image segmentation task the most efficient models have traditionally combined the structured modelling capabilities of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) with the feature extraction power of CNNs. In more recent works however, CRF post-processing has fallen out of favour. We argue that this is mainly due to the slow training and inference speeds of CRFs, as well as the difficulty of learning the internal CRF parameters. To overcome both issues we propose to add the assumption of conditional independence to the framework of fully-connected CRFs. This allows us to reformulate the inference in terms of convolutions, which can be implemented highly efficiently on GPUs. Doing so speeds up inference and training by a factor of more then 100. All parameters of the convolutional CRFs can easily be optimized using backpropagation. To facilitating further CRF research we make our implementation publicly available. Please visit: //github.com/MarvinTeichmann/ConvCRF
We propose a novel method capable of retrieving clips from untrimmed videos based on natural language queries. This cross-modal retrieval task plays a key role in visual-semantic understanding, and requires localizing clips in time and computing their similarity to the query sentence. Current methods generate sentence and video embeddings and then compare them using a late fusion approach, but this ignores the word order in queries and prevents more fine-grained comparisons. Motivated by the need for fine-grained multi-modal feature fusion, we propose a novel early fusion embedding approach that combines video and language information at the word level. Furthermore, we use the inverse task of dense video captioning as a side-task to improve the learned embedding. Our full model combines these components with an efficient proposal pipeline that performs accurate localization of potential video clips. We present a comprehensive experimental validation on two large-scale text-to-clip datasets (Charades-STA and DiDeMo) and attain state-of-the-art retrieval results with our model.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.
We propose an attentive local feature descriptor suitable for large-scale image retrieval, referred to as DELF (DEep Local Feature). The new feature is based on convolutional neural networks, which are trained only with image-level annotations on a landmark image dataset. To identify semantically useful local features for image retrieval, we also propose an attention mechanism for keypoint selection, which shares most network layers with the descriptor. This framework can be used for image retrieval as a drop-in replacement for other keypoint detectors and descriptors, enabling more accurate feature matching and geometric verification. Our system produces reliable confidence scores to reject false positives---in particular, it is robust against queries that have no correct match in the database. To evaluate the proposed descriptor, we introduce a new large-scale dataset, referred to as Google-Landmarks dataset, which involves challenges in both database and query such as background clutter, partial occlusion, multiple landmarks, objects in variable scales, etc. We show that DELF outperforms the state-of-the-art global and local descriptors in the large-scale setting by significant margins. Code and dataset can be found at the project webpage: //github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/delf .
Recognizing semantically similar sentences or paragraphs across languages is beneficial for many tasks, ranging from cross-lingual information retrieval and plagiarism detection to machine translation. Recently proposed methods for predicting cross-lingual semantic similarity of short texts, however, make use of tools and resources (e.g., machine translation systems, syntactic parsers or named entity recognition) that for many languages (or language pairs) do not exist. In contrast, we propose an unsupervised and a very resource-light approach for measuring semantic similarity between texts in different languages. To operate in the bilingual (or multilingual) space, we project continuous word vectors (i.e., word embeddings) from one language to the vector space of the other language via the linear translation model. We then align words according to the similarity of their vectors in the bilingual embedding space and investigate different unsupervised measures of semantic similarity exploiting bilingual embeddings and word alignments. Requiring only a limited-size set of word translation pairs between the languages, the proposed approach is applicable to virtually any pair of languages for which there exists a sufficiently large corpus, required to learn monolingual word embeddings. Experimental results on three different datasets for measuring semantic textual similarity show that our simple resource-light approach reaches performance close to that of supervised and resource intensive methods, displaying stability across different language pairs. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed method on two extrinsic tasks, namely extraction of parallel sentences from comparable corpora and cross lingual plagiarism detection, and show that it yields performance comparable to those of complex resource-intensive state-of-the-art models for the respective tasks.
Employing part-level features for pedestrian image description offers fine-grained information and has been verified as beneficial for person retrieval in very recent literature. A prerequisite of part discovery is that each part should be well located. Instead of using external cues, e.g., pose estimation, to directly locate parts, this paper lays emphasis on the content consistency within each part. Specifically, we target at learning discriminative part-informed features for person retrieval and make two contributions. (i) A network named Part-based Convolutional Baseline (PCB). Given an image input, it outputs a convolutional descriptor consisting of several part-level features. With a uniform partition strategy, PCB achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art methods, proving itself as a strong convolutional baseline for person retrieval. (ii) A refined part pooling (RPP) method. Uniform partition inevitably incurs outliers in each part, which are in fact more similar to other parts. RPP re-assigns these outliers to the parts they are closest to, resulting in refined parts with enhanced within-part consistency. Experiment confirms that RPP allows PCB to gain another round of performance boost. For instance, on the Market-1501 dataset, we achieve (77.4+4.2)% mAP and (92.3+1.5)% rank-1 accuracy, surpassing the state of the art by a large margin.
Content based video retrieval is an approach for facilitating the searching and browsing of large image collections over World Wide Web. In this approach, video analysis is conducted on low level visual properties extracted from video frame. We believed that in order to create an effective video retrieval system, visual perception must be taken into account. We conjectured that a technique which employs multiple features for indexing and retrieval would be more effective in the discrimination and search tasks of videos. In order to validate this claim, content based indexing and retrieval systems were implemented using color histogram, various texture features and other approaches. Videos were stored in Oracle 9i Database and a user study measured correctness of response.