Book•
Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval
27 Jun 2009-
TL;DR: Three major approaches to learning to rank are introduced, i.e., the pointwise, pairwise, and listwise approaches, the relationship between the loss functions used in these approaches and the widely-used IR evaluation measures are analyzed, and the performance of these approaches on the LETOR benchmark datasets is evaluated.
Abstract: This tutorial is concerned with a comprehensive introduction to the research area of learning to rank for information retrieval. In the first part of the tutorial, we will introduce three major approaches to learning to rank, i.e., the pointwise, pairwise, and listwise approaches, analyze the relationship between the loss functions used in these approaches and the widely-used IR evaluation measures, evaluate the performance of these approaches on the LETOR benchmark datasets, and demonstrate how to use these approaches to solve real ranking applications. In the second part of the tutorial, we will discuss some advanced topics regarding learning to rank, such as relational ranking, diverse ranking, semi-supervised ranking, transfer ranking, query-dependent ranking, and training data preprocessing. In the third part, we will briefly mention the recent advances on statistical learning theory for ranking, which explain the generalization ability and statistical consistency of different ranking methods. In the last part, we will conclude the tutorial and show several future research directions.
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17 Dec 2009TL;DR: This work presents the PRF from a conceptual point of view, describing the probabilistic modelling assumptions behind the framework and the different ranking algorithms that result from its application: the binary independence model, relevance feedback models, BM25 and BM25F.
Abstract: The Probabilistic Relevance Framework (PRF) is a formal framework for document retrieval, grounded in work done in the 1970—1980s, which led to the development of one of the most successful text-retrieval algorithms, BM25. In recent years, research in the PRF has yielded new retrieval models capable of taking into account document meta-data (especially structure and link-graph information). Again, this has led to one of the most successful Web-search and corporate-search algorithms, BM25F. This work presents the PRF from a conceptual point of view, describing the probabilistic modelling assumptions behind the framework and the different ranking algorithms that result from its application: the binary independence model, relevance feedback models, BM25 and BM25F. It also discusses the relation between the PRF and other statistical models for IR, and covers some related topics, such as the use of non-textual features, and parameter optimisation for models with free parameters.
2,037 citations
20 Jun 2007
TL;DR: It is proposed that learning to rank should adopt the listwise approach in which lists of objects are used as 'instances' in learning, and introduces two probability models, respectively referred to as permutation probability and top k probability, to define a listwise loss function for learning.
Abstract: The paper is concerned with learning to rank, which is to construct a model or a function for ranking objects. Learning to rank is useful for document retrieval, collaborative filtering, and many other applications. Several methods for learning to rank have been proposed, which take object pairs as 'instances' in learning. We refer to them as the pairwise approach in this paper. Although the pairwise approach offers advantages, it ignores the fact that ranking is a prediction task on list of objects. The paper postulates that learning to rank should adopt the listwise approach in which lists of objects are used as 'instances' in learning. The paper proposes a new probabilistic method for the approach. Specifically it introduces two probability models, respectively referred to as permutation probability and top k probability, to define a listwise loss function for learning. Neural Network and Gradient Descent are then employed as model and algorithm in the learning method. Experimental results on information retrieval show that the proposed listwise approach performs better than the pairwise approach.
2,003 citations
TL;DR: Examination of existing deep learning techniques for addressing class imbalanced data finds that research in this area is very limited, that most existing work focuses on computer vision tasks with convolutional neural networks, and that the effects of big data are rarely considered.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine existing deep learning techniques for addressing class imbalanced data. Effective classification with imbalanced data is an important area of research, as high class imbalance is naturally inherent in many real-world applications, e.g., fraud detection and cancer detection. Moreover, highly imbalanced data poses added difficulty, as most learners will exhibit bias towards the majority class, and in extreme cases, may ignore the minority class altogether. Class imbalance has been studied thoroughly over the last two decades using traditional machine learning models, i.e. non-deep learning. Despite recent advances in deep learning, along with its increasing popularity, very little empirical work in the area of deep learning with class imbalance exists. Having achieved record-breaking performance results in several complex domains, investigating the use of deep neural networks for problems containing high levels of class imbalance is of great interest. Available studies regarding class imbalance and deep learning are surveyed in order to better understand the efficacy of deep learning when applied to class imbalanced data. This survey discusses the implementation details and experimental results for each study, and offers additional insight into their strengths and weaknesses. Several areas of focus include: data complexity, architectures tested, performance interpretation, ease of use, big data application, and generalization to other domains. We have found that research in this area is very limited, that most existing work focuses on computer vision tasks with convolutional neural networks, and that the effects of big data are rarely considered. Several traditional methods for class imbalance, e.g. data sampling and cost-sensitive learning, prove to be applicable in deep learning, while more advanced methods that exploit neural network feature learning abilities show promising results. The survey concludes with a discussion that highlights various gaps in deep learning from class imbalanced data for the purpose of guiding future research.
1,377 citations
TL;DR: A thorough overview and analysis of the main approaches to entity linking is presented, and various applications, the evaluation of entity linking systems, and future directions are discussed.
Abstract: The large number of potential applications from bridging web data with knowledge bases have led to an increase in the entity linking research. Entity linking is the task to link entity mentions in text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. Potential applications include information extraction, information retrieval, and knowledge base population. However, this task is challenging due to name variations and entity ambiguity. In this survey, we present a thorough overview and analysis of the main approaches to entity linking, and discuss various applications, the evaluation of entity linking systems, and future directions.
702 citations
Cites background from "Learning to Rank for Information Re..."
...learning to rank framework [114] to give a rank to the candidate entity set and take into account relations between candidate entities for the same entity mention rather than...
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16 Apr 2012
TL;DR: This paper studies spam detection in the collaborative setting, i.e., to discover fake reviewer groups by using several behavioral models derived from the collusion phenomenon among fake reviewers and relation models based on the relationships among groups, individual reviewers, and products they reviewed to detectfake reviewer groups.
Abstract: Opinionated social media such as product reviews are now widely used by individuals and organizations for their decision making. However, due to the reason of profit or fame, people try to game the system by opinion spamming (e.g., writing fake reviews) to promote or demote some target products. For reviews to reflect genuine user experiences and opinions, such spam reviews should be detected. Prior works on opinion spam focused on detecting fake reviews and individual fake reviewers. However, a fake reviewer group (a group of reviewers who work collaboratively to write fake reviews) is even more damaging as they can take total control of the sentiment on the target product due to its size. This paper studies spam detection in the collaborative setting, i.e., to discover fake reviewer groups. The proposed method first uses a frequent itemset mining method to find a set of candidate groups. It then uses several behavioral models derived from the collusion phenomenon among fake reviewers and relation models based on the relationships among groups, individual reviewers, and products they reviewed to detect fake reviewer groups. Additionally, we also built a labeled dataset of fake reviewer groups. Although labeling individual fake reviews and reviewers is very hard, to our surprise labeling fake reviewer groups is much easier. We also note that the proposed technique departs from the traditional supervised learning approach for spam detection because of the inherent nature of our problem which makes the classic supervised learning approach less effective. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms multiple strong baselines including the state-of-the-art supervised classification, regression, and learning to rank algorithms.
685 citations
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"Learning to Rank for Information Re..." refers background in this paper
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...Most recently, there is an explosion of research in the general area of learning ranking functions and its applications in information retrieval and Web search: machine learning algorithms for a variety of objective functions that more closely match the metrics used in information retrieval and Web search [7, 23, 25]; learning from pairwise preference data using gradient boosting framework [27, 28]; and extending pairwise preference learning to list learning [8]....
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