Existing search engines use keyword matching or tf-idf based matching to map the query to the web-documents and rank them. They also consider other factors such as page rank, hubs-and-authority scores, knowledge graphs to make the results more meaningful. However, the existing search engines fail to capture the meaning of query when it becomes large and complex. BERT, introduced by Google in 2018, provides embeddings for words as well as sentences. In this paper, I have developed a semantics-oriented search engine using neural networks and BERT embeddings that can search for query and rank the documents in the order of the most meaningful to least meaningful. The results shows improvement over one existing search engine for complex queries for given set of documents.
DFKI GmbH（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）
In this paper, we focus on the classification of books using short descriptive texts (cover blurbs) and additional metadata. Building upon BERT, a deep neural language model, we demonstrate how to combine text representations with metadata and knowledge graph embeddings, which encode author information. Compared to the standard BERT approach we achieve considerably better results for the classification task. For a more coarse-grained classification using eight labels we achieve an F1- score of 87.20, while a detailed classification using 343 labels yields an F1-score of 64.70. We make the sour…
Bocconi University（博科尼大学）；Coveo；Coveo AI Labs（Coveo人工智能实验室）
Word embeddings (e.g., word2vec) have been applied successfully to eCommerce products through~\textit{prod2vec}. Inspired by the recent performance improvements on several NLP tasks brought by contextualized embeddings, we propose to transfer BERT-like architectures to eCommerce: our model -- ~\textit{Prod2BERT} -- is trained to generate representations of products through masked session modeling. Through extensive experiments over multiple shops, different tasks, and a range of design choices, we systematically compare the accuracy of~\textit{Prod2BERT} and~\textit{prod2vec} embeddings: while…
The enormous growth of research publications has made it challenging for academic search engines to bring the most relevant papers against the given search query. Numerous solutions have been proposed over the years to improve the effectiveness of academic search, including exploiting query expansion and citation analysis. Query expansion techniques mitigate the mismatch between the language used in a query and indexed documents. However, these techniques can suffer from introducing non-relevant information while expanding the original query. Recently, contextualized model BERT to document ret…
Word embeddings, made widely popular in 2013 with the release of word2vec, have become a mainstay of NLP engineering pipelines. Recently, with the release of BERT, word embeddings have moved from the term-based embedding space to the contextual embedding space -- each term is no longer represented by a single low-dimensional vector but instead each term and \emph{its context} determine the vector weights. BERT's setup and architecture have been shown to be general enough to be applicable to many natural language tasks. Importantly for Information Retrieval (IR), in contrast to prior deep learn…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Distantly-supervised relation extraction (RE) is an effective method to scale RE to large corpora but suffers from noisy labels. Existing approaches try to alleviate noise through multi-instance learning and by providing additional information, but manage to recognize mainly the top frequent relations, neglecting those in the long-tail. We propose REDSandT (Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision and Transformers), a novel distantly-supervised transformer-based RE method, that manages to capture a wider set of relations through highly informative instance and label embeddings for RE, by e…
Existing unsupervised document hashing methods are mostly established on generative models. Due to the difficulties of capturing long dependency structures, these methods rarely model the raw documents directly, but instead to model the features extracted from them (e.g. bag-of-words (BOW), TFIDF). In this paper, we propose to learn hash codes from BERT embeddings after observing their tremendous successes on downstream tasks. As a first try, we modify existing generative hashing models to accommodate the BERT embeddings. However, little improvement is observed over the codes learned from the …
Customers' reviews and comments are important for businesses to understand users' sentiment about the products and services. However, this data needs to be analyzed to assess the sentiment associated with topics/aspects to provide efficient customer assistance. LDA and LSA fail to capture the semantic relationship and are not specific to any domain. In this study, we evaluate BERTopic, a novel method that generates topics using sentence embeddings on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) data. Our work shows that BERTopic is flexible and yet provides meaningful and diverse topics compare…
Georgetown University（乔治城大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Although considerable attention has been given to neural ranking architectures recently, far less attention has been paid to the term representations that are used as input to these models. In this work, we investigate how two pretrained contextualized language models (ELMo and BERT) can be utilized for ad-hoc document ranking. Through experiments on TREC benchmarks, we find that several existing neural ranking architectures can benefit from the additional context provided by contextualized language models. Furthermore, we propose a joint approach that incorporates BERT's classification vector…
In this paper we focus on constructing useful embeddings of textual information in vacancies and resumes, which we aim to incorporate as features into job to job seeker matching models alongside other features. We explain our task where noisy data from parsed resumes, heterogeneous nature of the different sources of data, and crosslinguality and multilinguality present domain-specific challenges. We address these challenges by fine-tuning a Siamese Sentence-BERT (SBERT) model, which we call conSultantBERT, using a large-scale, real-world, and high quality dataset of over 270,000 resume-vacancy…
Efficient document retrieval heavily relies on the technique of semantic hashing, which learns a binary code for every document and employs Hamming distance to evaluate document distances. However, existing semantic hashing methods are mostly established on outdated TFIDF features, which obviously do not contain lots of important semantic information about documents. Furthermore, the Hamming distance can only be equal to one of several integer values, significantly limiting its representational ability for document distances. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose to leverage BERT …
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；School of Computing, University of Utah（犹他大学计算机学院）
Several NLP tasks need the effective representation of text documents. Arora et. al., 2017 demonstrate that simple weighted averaging of word vectors frequently outperforms neural models. SCDV (Mekala et. al., 2017) further extends this from sentences to documents by employing soft and sparse clustering over pre-computed word vectors. However, both techniques ignore the polysemy and contextual character of words. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing SCDV+BERT(ctxd), a simple and effective unsupervised representation that combines contextualized BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) based wor…
Conversational search is an emerging topic in the information retrieval community. One of the major challenges to multi-turn conversational search is to model the conversation history to answer the current question. Existing methods either prepend history turns to the current question or use complicated attention mechanisms to model the history. We propose a conceptually simple yet highly effective approach referred to as history answer embedding. It enables seamless integration of conversation history into a conversational question answering (ConvQA) model built on BERT (Bidirectional Encoder…
Web search engines focus on serving highly relevant results within hundreds of milliseconds. Pre-trained language transformer models such as BERT are therefore hard to use in this scenario due to their high computational demands. We present our real-time approach to the document ranking problem leveraging a BERT-based siamese architecture. The model is already deployed in a commercial search engine and it improves production performance by more than 3%. For further research and evaluation, we release DaReCzech, a unique data set of 1.6 million Czech user query-document pairs with manually assi…
Pre-trained language models such as BERT have been a key ingredient to achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of tasks in natural language processing and, more recently, also in information retrieval.Recent research even claims that BERT is able to capture factual knowledge about entity relations and properties, the information that is commonly obtained from knowledge graphs. This paper investigates the following question: Do BERT-based entity retrieval models benefit from additional entity information stored in knowledge graphs? To address this research question, we map entity embeddin…
NOVA School of Science and Technology（新里斯本大学科学与技术学院）
The use of conversational assistants to search for information is becoming increasingly more popular among the general public, pushing the research towards more advanced and sophisticated techniques. In the last few years, in particular, the interest in conversational search is increasing, not only because of the generalization of conversational assistants but also because conversational search is a step forward in allowing a more natural interaction with the system. In this work, the focus is on exploring the context present of the conversation via the historical utterances and respective emb…
Pre-trained language models like BERT have achieved great success in a wide variety of NLP tasks, while the superior performance comes with high demand in computational resources, which hinders the application in low-latency IR systems. We present TwinBERT model for effective and efficient retrieval, which has twin-structured BERT-like encoders to represent query and document respectively and a crossing layer to combine the embeddings and produce a similarity score. Different from BERT, where the two input sentences are concatenated and encoded together, TwinBERT decouples them during encoding…
Document screening is a central task within Evidenced Based Medicine, which is a clinical discipline that supplements scientific proof to back medical decisions. Given the recent advances in DL (Deep Learning) methods applied to Information Retrieval tasks, I propose a DL document classification approach with BERT or PubMedBERT embeddings and a DL similarity search path using SBERT embeddings to reduce physicians' tasks of screening and classifying immense amounts of documents to answer clinical queries. I test and evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of my DL strategy on the 2017 and 2018 CLE…
This paper presents a way of doing large scale audio understanding without traditional state of the art neural architectures. Ever since the introduction of deep learning for understanding audio signals in the past decade, convolutional architectures have been able to achieve state of the art results surpassing traditional hand-crafted features. In the recent past, there has been a similar shift away from traditional convolutional and recurrent neural networks towards purely end-to-end Transformer architectures. We, in this work, explore an approach, based on Bag-of-Words model. Our approach d…
