Neural Ranking Models Research Articles

Real-time Burst Photo Selection Using a Light-Head Adversarial Network.

We present an automatic moment capture system that runs in real-time on mobile cameras. The system is designed to run in the viewfinder mode and capture a burst sequence of frames before and after the shutter is pressed. For each frame, the system predicts in real-time a goodness score, based on which the best moment in the burst can be selected immediately after the shutter is released. We develop a highly efficient deep neural network ranking model, which implicitly learns a latent relative attribute space to capture subtle visual differences within a sequence of burst images. The overall goodness is computed as a linear aggregation of the goodnesses of all the latent attributes. To obtain a compact model which can run on mobile devices in real-time, we have explored and evaluated a wide range of network design choices, taking into account the constraints of model size, computational cost, and accuracy. Extensive studies show that the best frame predicted by our model hit users' top-1 (out of 11 on average) choice for 64.1% cases and top-3 choices for 86.2% cases. Moreover, the model (only 0.47M Bytes) can run in real time on mobile devices, e.g. 13ms on iPhone 7.

Investigating Weak Supervision in Deep Ranking

A number of deep neural networks have been proposed to improve the performance of document ranking in information retrieval studies. However, the training processes of these models usually need a large scale of labeled data, leading to data shortage becoming a major hindrance to the improvement of neural ranking models' performances. Recently, several weakly supervised methods have been proposed to address this challenge with the help of heuristics or users' interaction in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) to generate weak relevance labels. In this work, we adopt two kinds of weakly supervised relevance, BM25-based relevance and click model-based relevance, and make a deep investigation into their differences in the training of neural ranking models. Experimental results show that BM25-based relevance helps models capture more exact matching signals, while click model-based relevance enhances the rankings of documents that may be preferred by users. We further proposed a cascade ranking framework to combine the two weakly supervised relevance, which significantly promotes the ranking performance of neural ranking models and outperforms the best result in the last NTCIR-13 We Want Web (WWW) task. This work reveals the potential of constructing better document retrieval systems based on multiple kinds of weak relevance signals.

Multi-Perspective Relevance Matching with Hierarchical ConvNets for Social Media Search

Despite substantial interest in applications of neural networks to information retrieval, neural ranking models have mostly been applied to “standard” ad hoc retrieval tasks over web pages and newswire articles. This paper proposes MP-HCNN (Multi-Perspective Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network), a novel neural ranking model specifically designed for ranking short social media posts. We identify document length, informal language, and heterogeneous relevance signals as features that distinguish documents in our domain, and present a model specifically designed with these characteristics in mind. Our model uses hierarchical convolutional layers to learn latent semantic soft-match relevance signals at the character, word, and phrase levels. A poolingbased similarity measurement layer integrates evidence from multiple types of matches between the query, the social media post, as well as URLs contained in the post. Extensive experiments using Twitter data from the TREC Microblog Tracks 2011–2014 show that our model significantly outperforms prior feature-based as well as existing neural ranking models. To our best knowledge, this paper presents the first substantial work tackling search over social media posts using neural ranking models. Our code and data are publicly available.1

Text Assisted Insight Ranking Using Context-Aware Memory Network

Extracting valuable facts or informative summaries from multi-dimensional tables, i.e. insight mining, is an important task in data analysis and business intelligence. However, ranking the importance of insights remains a challenging and unexplored task. The main challenge is that explicitly scoring an insight or giving it a rank requires a thorough understanding of the tables and costs a lot of manual efforts, which leads to the lack of available training data for the insight ranking problem. In this paper, we propose an insight ranking model that consists of two parts: A neural ranking model explores the data characteristics, such as the header semantics and the data statistical features, and a memory network model introduces table structure and context information into the ranking process. We also build a dataset with text assistance. Experimental results show that our approach largely improves the ranking precision as reported in multi evaluation metrics.

A Deep Look into neural ranking models for information retrieval

Ranking models lie at the heart of research on information retrieval (IR). During the past decades, different techniques have been proposed for constructing ranking models, from traditional heuristic methods, probabilistic methods, to modern machine learning methods. Recently, with the advance of deep learning technology, we have witnessed a growing body of work in applying shallow or deep neural networks to the ranking problem in IR, referred to as neural ranking models in this paper. The power of neural ranking models lies in the ability to learn from the raw text inputs for the ranking problem to avoid many limitations of hand-crafted features. Neural networks have sufficient capacity to model complicated tasks, which is needed to handle the complexity of relevance estimation in ranking. Since there have been a large variety of neural ranking models proposed, we believe it is the right time to summarize the current status, learn from existing methodologies, and gain some insights for future development. In contrast to existing reviews, in this survey, we will take a deep look into the neural ranking models from different dimensions to analyze their underlying assumptions, major design principles, and learning strategies. We compare these models through benchmark tasks to obtain a comprehensive empirical understanding of the existing techniques. We will also discuss what is missing in the current literature and what are the promising and desired future directions.

Neural Personalized Ranking via Poisson Factor Model for Item Recommendation

Recommender systems have become indispensable for online services since they alleviate the information overload problem for users. Some work has been proposed to support the personalized recommendation by utilizing collaborative filtering to learn the latent user and item representations from implicit interactions between users and items. However, most of existing methods simplify the implicit frequency feedback to binary values, which make collaborative filtering unable to accurately learn the latent user and item features. Moreover, the traditional collaborating filtering methods generally use the linear functions to model the interactions between latent features. The expressiveness of linear functions may not be sufficient to capture the complex structure of users’ interactions and degrades the performance of those recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a neural personalized ranking model for collaborative filtering with the implicit frequency feedback. The proposed method integrates the ranking‐based poisson factor model into the neural networks. Specifically, we firstly develop a ranking‐based poisson factor model, which combines the poisson factor model and the Bayesian personalized ranking. This model adopts a pair‐wise learning method to learn the rankings of uses’ preferences between items. After that, we propose a neural personalized ranking model on top of the ranking‐based poisson factor model, named NRPFM, to capture the complex structure of user‐item interactions. NRPFM applies the ranking‐based poisson factor model on neural networks, which endows the linear ranking‐based poisson factor model with a high level of nonlinearities. Experimental results on two real‐world datasets show that our proposed method compares favorably with the state‐of‐the‐art recommendation algorithms.

Neural ranking for automatic image annotation

Automatic image annotation aims to predict labels for images according to their semantic contents and has become a research focus in computer vision, as it helps people to edit, retrieve and understand large image collections. In the last decades, researchers have proposed many approaches to solve this task and achieved remarkable performance on several standard image datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel learning to rank approach to address image auto-annotation problem. Unlike typical learning to rank algorithms for image auto-annotation which directly rank annotations for image, our approach consists of two phases. In the first phase, neural ranking models are trained to rank image’s semantic neighbors. Then nearest-neighbor based models propagate annotations from these semantic neighbors to the image. Thus our approach integrates learning to rank algorithms and nearest-neighbor based models, including TagProp and 2PKNN, and inherits their advantages. Experimental results show that our method achieves better or comparable performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods on four challenging benchmarks including Corel5K, ESP Games, IAPR TC-12 and NUS-WIDE.

Improving document ranking with genetic and optimization algorithms

AbstractThere are many applications to ranking including page searching, question answering, recommender systems, sentiment analysis, and collaborative filtering, to name a few. In the past several years, machine learning and information retrieval techniques have been used to develop ranking algorithms, and several listwise approaches to learning to rank have been developed. We propose a new method, which we call GeneticListMLE++ and GeneticListNet++, which builds on the original ListMLE and ListNet algorithms. Our method substantially improves on the original ListMLE and ListNet ranking approaches by incorporating genetic optimization of hyperparameters, a nonlinear neural network ranking model, and a regularization technique.

A neural network based solution for automatic typing errors correction

Multiple algorithms have been developed to correct user’s typing mistakes. However, an optimal solution is hardly identified among them. Moreover, these solutions rarely produce a single answer or share common results, and the answers may change with time and context. These motivated this research to synthesize some distinct word correction algorithms to produce an optimal prediction based on database updates and neural network learning. In this paper, three distinct typing correction algorithms are integrated as a pilot research with key factors such as Time Change, Context Change and User Feedback being considered. Experimental results show that the developed WLR model (i.e., word-list neural network ranking model) achieves the best results in comparison with Levenshtein distance, Metaphone. and Two-Gram prediction algorithms throughout all stages. It achieves 57.50% Ranking First Hitting Rate with samples of category one and a best Ranking First Hitting Rate of 74.69% within category four. Further work is recommended to extend the number of parameters and integrate more algorithms to achieve a higher level of accuracy.