No Arabic abstract
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
This paper presents CLEAR, a retrieval model that seeks to complement classical lexical exact-match models such as BM25 with semantic matching signals from a neural embedding matching model. CLEAR explicitly trains the neural embedding to encode language structures and semantics that lexical retrieval fails to capture with a novel residual-based embedding learning method. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the advantages of CLEAR over state-of-the-art retrieval models, and that it can substantially improve the end-to-end accuracy and efficiency of reranking pipelines.
Search engines often follow a two-phase paradigm where in the first stage (the retrieval stage) an initial set of documents is retrieved and in the second stage (the re-ranking stage) the documents are re-ranked to obtain the final result list. While deep neural networks were shown to improve the performance of the re-ranking stage in previous works, there is little literature about using deep neural networks to improve the retrieval stage. In this paper, we study the merits of combining deep neural network models and lexical models for the retrieval stage. A hybrid approach, which leverages both semantic (deep neural network-based) and lexical (keyword matching-based) retrieval models, is proposed. We perform an empirical study, using a publicly available TREC collection, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach and sheds light on the different characteristics of the semantic approach, the lexical approach, and their combination.
Similar question retrieval is a core task in community-based question answering (CQA) services. To balance the effectiveness and efficiency, the question retrieval system is typically implemented as multi-stage rankers: The first-stage ranker aims to recall potentially relevant questions from a large repository, and the latter stages attempt to re-rank the retrieved results. Most existing works on question retrieval mainly focused on the re-ranking stages, leaving the first-stage ranker to some traditional term-based methods. However, term-based methods often suffer from the vocabulary mismatch problem, especially on short texts, which may block the re-rankers from relevant questions at the very beginning. An alternative is to employ embedding-based methods for the first-stage ranker, which compress texts into dense vectors to enhance the semantic matching. However, these methods often lose the discriminative power as term-based methods, thus introduce noise during retrieval and hurt the recall performance. In this work, we aim to tackle the dilemma of the first-stage ranker, and propose a discriminative semantic ranker, namely DenseTrans, for high-recall retrieval. Specifically, DenseTrans is a densely connected Transformer, which learns semantic embeddings for texts based on Transformer layers. Meanwhile, DenseTrans promotes low-level features through dense connections to keep the discriminative power of the learned representations. DenseTrans is inspired by DenseNet in computer vision (CV), but poses a new way to use the dense connectivity which is totally different from its original design purpose. Experimental results over two question retrieval benchmark datasets show that our model can obtain significant gain on recall against strong term-based methods as well as state-of-the-art embedding-based methods.
On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to select Top N ads through inverted indexes. In this way, an ad will not be retrieved even if queries are related when the advertiser does not bid on corresponding keywords. Moreover, most ad retrieval approaches regard rewriting and ad-selecting as two separated tasks, and focus on boosting relevance between search queries and ads. Recently, in e-commerce sponsored search more and more personalized information has been introduced, such as user profiles, long-time and real-time clicks. Personalized information makes ad retrieval able to employ more elements (e.g. real-time clicks) as search signals and retrieval keys, however it makes ad retrieval more difficult to measure ads retrieved through different signals. To address these problems, we propose a novel ad retrieval framework beyond keywords and relevance in e-commerce sponsored search. Firstly, we employ historical ad click data to initialize a hierarchical network representing signals, keys and ads, in which personalized information is introduced. Then we train a model on top of the hierarchical network by learning the weights of edges. Finally we select the best edges according to the model, boosting RPM/CTR. Experimental results on our e-commerce platform demonstrate that our ad retrieval framework achieves good performance.
We present an approach to combining distributional semantic representations induced from text corpora with manually constructed lexical-semantic networks. While both kinds of semantic resources are available with high lexical coverage, our aligned resource combines the domain specificity and availability of contextual information from distributional models with the conciseness and high quality of manually crafted lexical networks. We start with a distributional representation of induced senses of vocabulary terms, which are accompanied with rich context information given by related lexical items. We then automatically disambiguate such representations to obtain a full-fledged proto-conceptualization, i.e. a typed graph of induced word senses. In a final step, this proto-conceptualization is aligned to a lexical ontology, resulting in a hybrid aligned resource. Moreover, unmapped induced senses are associated with a semantic type in order to connect them to the core resource. Manual evaluations against ground-truth judgments for different stages of our method as well as an extrinsic evaluation on a knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation benchmark all indicate the high quality of the new hybrid resource. Additionally, we show the benefits of enriching top-down lexical knowledge resources with bottom-up distributional information from text for addressing high-end knowledge acquisition tasks such as cleaning hypernym graphs and learning taxonomies from scratch.