Concepts are used to solve the term-mismatch problem. However, we need an effective similarity measure between concepts. Word embedding presents a promising solution. We present in this study three approaches to build concepts vectors based on words vectors. We use a vector-based measure to estimate inter-concepts similarity. Our experiments show promising results. Furthermore, words and concepts become comparable. This could be used to improve conceptual indexing process.
In retrieval applications, binary hashes are known to offer significant improvements in terms of both memory and speed. We investigate the compression of sentence embeddings using a neural encoder-decoder architecture, which is trained by minimizing reconstruction error. Instead of employing the original real-valued embeddings, we use latent representations in Hamming space produced by the encoder for similarity calculations. In quantitative experiments on several benchmarks for semantic similarity tasks, we show that our compressed hamming embeddings yield a comparable performance to uncompre…
Research Studio Data Science, RSA FG（RSA FG数据科学研究工作室）
We replicate recent experiments attempting to demonstrate an attractive hypothesis about the use of the Fisher kernel framework and mixture models for aggregating word embeddings towards document representations and the use of these representations in document classification, clustering, and retrieval. Specifically, the hypothesis was that the use of a mixture model of von Mises-Fisher (VMF) distributions instead of Gaussian distributions would be beneficial because of the focus on cosine distances of both VMF and the vector space model traditionally used in information retrieval. Previous exp…
Université de Grenoble（格勒诺布尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Saint-Étienne（圣艾蒂安大学）
This paper presents preliminary works on using Word Embedding (word2vec) for query expansion in the context of Personalized Information Retrieval. Traditionally, word embeddings are learned on a general corpus, like Wikipedia. In this work we try to personalize the word embeddings learning, by achieving the learning on the user's profile. The word embeddings are then in the same context than the user interests. Our proposal is evaluated on the CLEF Social Book Search 2016 collection. The results obtained show that some efforts should be made in the way to apply Word Embedding in the context of…
University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Google LLC.（谷歌有限责任公司）
Deep language models learning a hierarchical representation proved to be a powerful tool for natural language processing, text mining and information retrieval. However, representations that perform well for retrieval must capture semantic meaning at different levels of abstraction or context-scopes. In this paper, we propose a new method to generate multi-resolution word embeddings that represent documents at multiple resolutions in terms of context-scopes. In order to investigate its performance,we use the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and the Question Answering by Search And R…
Distributed representations of words have shown to be useful to improve the effectiveness of IR systems in many sub-tasks like query expansion, retrieval and ranking. Algorithms like word2vec, GloVe and others are also key factors in many improvements in different NLP tasks. One common issue with such embedding models is that words like happy and sad appear in similar contexts and hence are wrongly clustered close in the embedding space. In this paper we leverage Aff2Vec, a set of word embeddings models which include affect information, in order to better capture the affect aspect in news text…
We consider the large-scale query-document retrieval problem: given a query (e.g., a question), return the set of relevant documents (e.g., paragraphs containing the answer) from a large document corpus. This problem is often solved in two steps. The retrieval phase first reduces the solution space, returning a subset of candidate documents. The scoring phase then re-ranks the documents. Critically, the retrieval algorithm not only desires high recall but also requires to be highly efficient, returning candidates in time sublinear to the number of documents. Unlike the scoring phase witnessing…
Lessons Learned on Information Retrieval in Electronic Health Records: A Comparison of Embedding Models and Pooling Strategies
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Boston Children’s Hospital Harvard Medical School（波士顿儿童医院哈佛医学院）；University of Colorado Anschutz（科罗拉多大学安舒茨分校）；Loyola University Chicago（芝加哥洛约拉大学）
Ping An Technology（平安科技）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers proposed to introduce the QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. To keep independent encoding of questions and answers during inference stage, variational auto-encoder is further introduced to reconstruct answers (questions) from question (answer) embeddings as an auxiliary task to enhance QA intera…
Bridging the Question-Answer Gap in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Hypothetical Prompt Embeddings
University of Primorska（普里莫尔斯卡大学）；InnoRenew CoE；Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts（斯洛文尼亚科学与艺术研究院研究中心）；The Fran Ramovš Institute（弗兰·拉莫夫什研究所）
Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校计算机科学与工程系）
Cross-lingual information retrieval is a challenging task in the absence of aligned parallel corpora. In this paper, we address this problem by considering topically aligned corpora designed for evaluating an IR setup. To emphasize, we neither use any sentence-aligned corpora or document-aligned corpora, nor do we use any language specific resources such as dictionary, thesaurus, or grammar rules. Instead, we use an embedding into a common space and learn word correspondences directly from there. We test our proposed approach for bilingual IR on standard FIRE datasets for Bangla, Hindi and Eng…
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways in a…
Neural network representation learning frameworks have recently shown to be highly effective at a wide range of tasks ranging from radiography interpretation via data-driven diagnostics to clinical decision support. This often superior performance comes at the price of dramatically increased training data requirements that cannot be satisfied in every given institution or scenario. As a means of countering such data sparsity effects, distant supervision alleviates the need for scarce in-domain data by relying on a related, resource-rich, task for training. This study presents an end-to-end neu…
Word embedding or Word2Vec has been successful in offering semantics for text words learned from the context of words. Audio Word2Vec was shown to offer phonetic structures for spoken words (signal segments for words) learned from signals within spoken words. This paper proposes a two-stage framework to perform phonetic-and-semantic embedding on spoken words considering the context of the spoken words. Stage 1 performs phonetic embedding with speaker characteristics disentangled. Stage 2 then performs semantic embedding in addition. We further propose to evaluate the phonetic-and-semantic natu…
Tables contain valuable knowledge in a structured form. We employ neural language modeling approaches to embed tabular data into vector spaces. Specifically, we consider different table elements, such caption, column headings, and cells, for training word and entity embeddings. These embeddings are then utilized in three particular table-related tasks, row population, column population, and table retrieval, by incorporating them into existing retrieval models as additional semantic similarity signals. Evaluation results show that table embeddings can significantly improve upon the performance …
In this paper, we propose a new approach to learn multimodal multilingual embeddings for matching images and their relevant captions in two languages. We combine two existing objective functions to make images and captions close in a joint embedding space while adapting the alignment of word embeddings between existing languages in our model. We show that our approach enables better generalization, achieving state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval task, and caption-caption similarity task. Two multimodal multilingual datasets are used for evaluation: Multi30k …
In this research, we improve upon the current state of the art in entity retrieval by re-ranking the result list using graph embeddings. The paper shows that graph embeddings are useful for entity-oriented search tasks. We demonstrate empirically that encoding information from the knowledge graph into (graph) embeddings contributes to a higher increase in effectiveness of entity retrieval results than using plain word embeddings. We analyze the impact of the accuracy of the entity linker on the overall retrieval effectiveness. Our analysis further deploys the cluster hypothesis to explain the …
Robustness Risk of Conversational Retrieval: Identifying and Mitigating Noise Sensitivity in Qwen3-Embedding Model
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；SenseTime（商汤科技）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Network System and Network Culture（网络系统与网络文化北京市重点实验室）
From Topology to Retrieval: Decoding Embedding Spaces with Unified Signatures
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Fribourg University（弗里堡大学）；Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Biberach (Riss), Germany（勃林格殷格翰公司）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
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.
Text embedding representing natural language documents in a semantic vector space can be used for document retrieval using nearest neighbor lookup. In order to study the feasibility of neural models specialized for retrieval in a semantically meaningful way, we suggest the use of the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) in an open-domain question answering context, where the first task is to find paragraphs useful for answering a given question. First, we compare the quality of various text-embedding methods on the performance of retrieval and give an extensive empirical comparison on t…
We present an analysis of large-scale pretrained deep learning models used for cross-modal (text-to-audio) retrieval. We use embeddings extracted by these models in a metric learning framework to connect matching pairs of audio and text. Shallow neural networks map the embeddings to a common dimensionality. Our system, which is an extension of our submission to the Language-based Audio Retrieval Task of the DCASE Challenge 2022, employs the RoBERTa foundation model as the text embedding extractor. A pretrained PANNs model extracts the audio embeddings. To improve the generalisation of our mode…
Embedding-based Retrieval (EBR) in e-commerce search is a powerful search retrieval technique to address semantic matches between search queries and products. However, commercial search engines like Facebook Marketplace Search are complex multi-stage systems optimized for multiple business objectives. At Facebook Marketplace, search retrieval focuses on matching search queries with relevant products, while search ranking puts more emphasis on contextual signals to up-rank the more engaging products. As a result, the end-to-end searcher experience is a function of both relevance and engagement,…
Finding semantically rich and computer-understandable representations for textual dialogues, utterances and words is crucial for dialogue systems (or conversational agents), as their performance mostly depends on understanding the context of conversations. Recent research aims at finding distributed vector representations (embeddings) for words, such that semantically similar words are relatively close within the vector-space. Encoding the "meaning" of text into vectors is a current trend, and text can range from words, phrases and documents to actual human-to-human conversations. In recent re…
Deep neural networks trained for classification have been found to learn powerful image representations, which are also often used for other tasks such as comparing images w.r.t. their visual similarity. However, visual similarity does not imply semantic similarity. In order to learn semantically discriminative features, we propose to map images onto class embeddings whose pair-wise dot products correspond to a measure of semantic similarity between classes. Such an embedding does not only improve image retrieval results, but could also facilitate integrating semantics for other tasks, e.g., n…
Dense retrievers encode queries and documents and map them in an embedding space using pre-trained language models. These embeddings need to be high-dimensional to fit training signals and guarantee the retrieval effectiveness of dense retrievers. However, these high-dimensional embeddings lead to larger index storage and higher retrieval latency. To reduce the embedding dimensions of dense retrieval, this paper proposes a Conditional Autoencoder (ConAE) to compress the high-dimensional embeddings to maintain the same embedding distribution and better recover the ranking features. Our experime…
Query Drift Compensation: Enabling Compatibility in Continual Learning of Retrieval Embedding Models
Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那计算机视觉中心）；Department of Computer Science, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机科学系）；IDEAS Research Center, Warsaw, Poland（华沙IDEAS研究中心）
This paper explores entity embedding effectiveness in ad-hoc entity retrieval, which introduces distributed representation of entities into entity retrieval. The knowledge graph contains lots of knowledge and models entity semantic relations with the well-formed structural representation. Entity embedding learns lots of semantic information from the knowledge graph and represents entities with a low-dimensional representation, which provides an opportunity to establish interactions between query related entities and candidate entities for entity retrieval. Our experiments demonstrate the effec…
