arXiv subjects

Jiaxin Mao

Publications and source records attributed to Jiaxin Mao.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Session-level Normalization and Click-through Data Enhancement for Session-based Evaluation

Since a user usually has to issue a sequence of queries and examine multiple documents to resolve a complex information need in a search session, researchers have paid much attention to evaluating search systems at the session level rather than the single-query level. Most existing session-level metrics evaluate each query separately and then aggregate the query-level scores using a session-level weighting function. The assumptions behind these metrics are that all queries in the session should be involved, and their orders are fixed. However, if a search system could make the user satisfied with her first few queries, she may not need any subsequent queries. Besides, in most real-world search scenarios, due to a lack of explicit feedback from real users, we can only leverage some implicit feedback, such as users' clicks, as relevance labels for offline evaluation. Such implicit feedback might be different from the real relevance in a search session as some documents may be omitted in the previous query but identified in the later reformulations. To address the above issues, we make two assumptions about session-based evaluation, which explicitly describe an ideal session-search system and how to enhance click-through data in computing session-level evaluation metrics. Based on our assumptions, we design a session-level metric called Normalized U-Measure (NUM). NUM evaluates a session as a whole and utilizes an ideal session to normalize the result of the actual session. Besides, it infers session-level relevance labels based on implicit feedback. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of NUM by comparing it with existing session-based metrics in terms of correlation with user satisfaction and intuitiveness. We also conduct ablation studies to explore whether these assumptions hold.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

CoAScore: Chain-of-Aspects Prompting for NLG Evaluation

Recently, natural language generation (NLG) evaluation has shifted from a single-aspect to a multi-aspect paradigm, allowing for a more accurate assessment. Large language models (LLMs) achieve superior performance on various NLG evaluation tasks. However, current work often employs the LLM to independently evaluate different aspects, which largely ignores the rich correlation between various aspects. To fill this research gap, in this work, we propose an NLG evaluation metric called CoAScore. Powered by LLMs, the CoAScore utilizes multi-aspect knowledge through a CoA (\textbf{C}hain-\textbf{o}f-\textbf{A}spects) prompting framework when assessing the quality of a certain aspect. Specifically, for a given aspect to evaluate, we first prompt the LLM to generate a chain of aspects that are relevant to the target aspect and could be useful for the evaluation. We then collect evaluation scores for each generated aspect, and finally, leverage the knowledge of these aspects to improve the evaluation of the target aspect. We evaluate CoAScore across five NLG evaluation tasks (e.g., summarization, dialog response generation, etc) and nine aspects (e.g., overall quality, relevance, coherence, etc). Our experimental findings highlight that, in comparison to individual aspect evaluation, CoAScore exhibits a higher correlation with human judgments. This improvement significantly outperforms existing unsupervised evaluation metrics, whether for assessing overall quality or other aspects. We also conducted extensive ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of the three stages within the CoAScore framework and conducted case studies to show how the LLM performs in these stages. Our code and scripts are available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

An Intent Taxonomy of Legal Case Retrieval

Legal case retrieval is a special Information Retrieval~(IR) task focusing on legal case documents. Depending on the downstream tasks of the retrieved case documents, users' information needs in legal case retrieval could be significantly different from those in Web search and traditional ad-hoc retrieval tasks. While there are several studies that retrieve legal cases based on text similarity, the underlying search intents of legal retrieval users, as shown in this paper, are more complicated than that yet mostly unexplored. To this end, we present a novel hierarchical intent taxonomy of legal case retrieval. It consists of five intent types categorized by three criteria, i.e., search for Particular Case(s), Characterization, Penalty, Procedure, and Interest. The taxonomy was constructed transparently and evaluated extensively through interviews, editorial user studies, and query log analysis. Through a laboratory user study, we reveal significant differences in user behavior and satisfaction under different search intents in legal case retrieval. Furthermore, we apply the proposed taxonomy to various downstream legal retrieval tasks, e.g., result ranking and satisfaction prediction, and demonstrate its effectiveness. Our work provides important insights into the understanding of user intents in legal case retrieval and potentially leads to better retrieval techniques in the legal domain, such as intent-aware ranking strategies and evaluation methodologies.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Constructing Tree-based Index for Efficient and Effective Dense Retrieval

Recent studies have shown that Dense Retrieval (DR) techniques can significantly improve the performance of first-stage retrieval in IR systems. Despite its empirical effectiveness, the application of DR is still limited. In contrast to statistic retrieval models that rely on highly efficient inverted index solutions, DR models build dense embeddings that are difficult to be pre-processed with most existing search indexing systems. To avoid the expensive cost of brute-force search, the Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithm and corresponding indexes are widely applied to speed up the inference process of DR models. Unfortunately, while ANN can improve the efficiency of DR models, it usually comes with a significant price on retrieval performance. To solve this issue, we propose JTR, which stands for Joint optimization of TRee-based index and query encoding. Specifically, we design a new unified contrastive learning loss to train tree-based index and query encoder in an end-to-end manner. The tree-based negative sampling strategy is applied to make the tree have the maximum heap property, which supports the effectiveness of beam search well. Moreover, we treat the cluster assignment as an optimization problem to update the tree-based index that allows overlapped clustering. We evaluate JTR on numerous popular retrieval benchmarks. Experimental results show that JTR achieves better retrieval performance while retaining high system efficiency compared with widely-adopted baselines. It provides a potential solution to balance efficiency and effectiveness in neural retrieval system designs.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

RANS Simulations of Turbulent Round Jets in the Presence of Density Difference and Comparison with High-Resolution Experimental Data

In this paper, the novel experimental data reported by Qin et al. [1] are used to assess the predictive capability of the Realizable k-epsilon (RKE) model and Reynolds stress transport (RST) model for buoyant jets and understand the reasons for discrepancies. In particular, we present the comparison between simulation results of a turbulent buoyant jet flow in the self-similar region with high-resolution experimental data obtained for a jet injected from a 2 mm nozzle into a 300x300x300 $mm^3$ tank, with nominal Reynolds number equal to 10,000. Results show that streamwise velocity profiles predicted by the RST model had good agreement with experimental data, while the larger spreading rate was predicted by the RKE model. For turbulent statistics, turbulent kinetic energy witnessed a discrepancy in the center region, with shear stress well predicted for both models. Comparison of the turbulent kinetic energy production term with experimental data revealed reasons for the discrepancy and also showed that the gradient of the streamwise velocity in the crosswise direction contributes the most to the turbulent kinetic energy production. Investigation of model coefficients of the turbulent dissipation equation for the RKE model has revealed that $C_{\varepsilon2}$ is critical in model accuracy.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2022

KuaiRec: A Fully-observed Dataset and Insights for Evaluating Recommender Systems

The progress of recommender systems is hampered mainly by evaluation as it requires real-time interactions between humans and systems, which is too laborious and expensive. This issue is usually approached by utilizing the interaction history to conduct offline evaluation. However, existing datasets of user-item interactions are partially observed, leaving it unclear how and to what extent the missing interactions will influence the evaluation. To answer this question, we collect a fully-observed dataset from Kuaishou's online environment, where almost all 1,411 users have been exposed to all 3,327 items. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world fully-observed data with millions of user-item interactions. With this unique dataset, we conduct a preliminary analysis of how the two factors - data density and exposure bias - affect the evaluation results of multi-round conversational recommendation. Our main discoveries are that the performance ranking of different methods varies with the two factors, and this effect can only be alleviated in certain cases by estimating missing interactions for user simulation. This demonstrates the necessity of the fully-observed dataset. We release the dataset and the pipeline implementation for evaluation at https://kuairec.com

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Disentangled Modeling of Domain and Relevance for Adaptable Dense Retrieval

Recent advance in Dense Retrieval (DR) techniques has significantly improved the effectiveness of first-stage retrieval. Trained with large-scale supervised data, DR models can encode queries and documents into a low-dimensional dense space and conduct effective semantic matching. However, previous studies have shown that the effectiveness of DR models would drop by a large margin when the trained DR models are adopted in a target domain that is different from the domain of the labeled data. One of the possible reasons is that the DR model has never seen the target corpus and thus might be incapable of mitigating the difference between the training and target domains. In practice, unfortunately, training a DR model for each target domain to avoid domain shift is often a difficult task as it requires additional time, storage, and domain-specific data labeling, which are not always available. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel DR framework named Disentangled Dense Retrieval (DDR) to support effective and flexible domain adaptation for DR models. DDR consists of a Relevance Estimation Module (REM) for modeling domain-invariant matching patterns and several Domain Adaption Modules (DAMs) for modeling domain-specific features of multiple target corpora. By making the REM and DAMs disentangled, DDR enables a flexible training paradigm in which REM is trained with supervision once and DAMs are trained with unsupervised data. Comprehensive experiments in different domains and languages show that DDR significantly improves ranking performance compared to strong DR baselines and substantially outperforms traditional retrieval methods in most scenarios.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Evaluating Interpolation and Extrapolation Performance of Neural Retrieval Models

A retrieval model should not only interpolate the training data but also extrapolate well to the queries that are different from the training data. While neural retrieval models have demonstrated impressive performance on ad-hoc search benchmarks, we still know little about how they perform in terms of interpolation and extrapolation. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of separately evaluating the two capabilities of neural retrieval models. Firstly, we examine existing ad-hoc search benchmarks from the two perspectives. We investigate the distribution of training and test data and find a considerable overlap in query entities, query intent, and relevance labels. This finding implies that the evaluation on these test sets is biased toward interpolation and cannot accurately reflect the extrapolation capacity. Secondly, we propose a novel evaluation protocol to separately evaluate the interpolation and extrapolation performance on existing benchmark datasets. It resamples the training and test data based on query similarity and utilizes the resampled dataset for training and evaluation. Finally, we leverage the proposed evaluation protocol to comprehensively revisit a number of widely-adopted neural retrieval models. Results show models perform differently when moving from interpolation to extrapolation. For example, representation-based retrieval models perform almost as well as interaction-based retrieval models in terms of interpolation but not extrapolation. Therefore, it is necessary to separately evaluate both interpolation and extrapolation performance and the proposed resampling method serves as a simple yet effective evaluation tool for future IR studies.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Interacting with Non-Cooperative User: A New Paradigm for Proactive Dialogue Policy

Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Interpreting Dense Retrieval as Mixture of Topics

Dense Retrieval (DR) reaches state-of-the-art results in first-stage retrieval, but little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to its success. Therefore, in this work, we conduct an interpretation study of recently proposed DR models. Specifically, we first discretize the embeddings output by the document and query encoders. Based on the discrete representations, we analyze the attribution of input tokens. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments are carried out on public test collections. Results suggest that DR models pay attention to different aspects of input and extract various high-level topic representations. Therefore, we can regard the representations learned by DR models as a mixture of high-level topics.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Learning Discrete Representations via Constrained Clustering for Effective and Efficient Dense Retrieval

Dense Retrieval (DR) has achieved state-of-the-art first-stage ranking effectiveness. However, the efficiency of most existing DR models is limited by the large memory cost of storing dense vectors and the time-consuming nearest neighbor search (NNS) in vector space. Therefore, we present RepCONC, a novel retrieval model that learns discrete Representations via CONstrained Clustering. RepCONC jointly trains dual-encoders and the Product Quantization (PQ) method to learn discrete document representations and enables fast approximate NNS with compact indexes. It models quantization as a constrained clustering process, which requires the document embeddings to be uniformly clustered around the quantization centroids and supports end-to-end optimization of the quantization method and dual-encoders. We theoretically demonstrate the importance of the uniform clustering constraint in RepCONC and derive an efficient approximate solution for constrained clustering by reducing it to an instance of the optimal transport problem. Besides constrained clustering, RepCONC further adopts a vector-based inverted file system (IVF) to support highly efficient vector search on CPUs. Extensive experiments on two popular ad-hoc retrieval benchmarks show that RepCONC achieves better ranking effectiveness than competitive vector quantization baselines under different compression ratio settings. It also substantially outperforms a wide range of existing retrieval models in terms of retrieval effectiveness, memory efficiency, and time efficiency.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

POSSCORE: A Simple Yet Effective Evaluation of Conversational Search with Part of Speech Labelling

Conversational search systems, such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, provide a new search paradigm where users are allowed, via natural language dialogues, to communicate with search systems. Evaluating such systems is very challenging since search results are presented in the format of natural language sentences. Given the unlimited number of possible responses, collecting relevance assessments for all the possible responses is infeasible. In this paper, we propose POSSCORE, a simple yet effective automatic evaluation method for conversational search. The proposed embedding-based metric takes the influence of part of speech (POS) of the terms in the response into account. To the best knowledge, our work is the first to systematically demonstrate the importance of incorporating syntactic information, such as POS labels, for conversational search evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our metrics can correlate with human preference, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art baseline metrics.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Jointly Optimizing Query Encoder and Product Quantization to Improve Retrieval Performance

Recently, Information Retrieval community has witnessed fast-paced advances in Dense Retrieval (DR), which performs first-stage retrieval with embedding-based search. Despite the impressive ranking performance, previous studies usually adopt brute-force search to acquire candidates, which is prohibitive in practical Web search scenarios due to its tremendous memory usage and time cost. To overcome these problems, vector compression methods have been adopted in many practical embedding-based retrieval applications. One of the most popular methods is Product Quantization (PQ). However, although existing vector compression methods including PQ can help improve the efficiency of DR, they incur severely decayed retrieval performance due to the separation between encoding and compression. To tackle this problem, we present JPQ, which stands for Joint optimization of query encoding and Product Quantization. It trains the query encoder and PQ index jointly in an end-to-end manner based on three optimization strategies, namely ranking-oriented loss, PQ centroid optimization, and end-to-end negative sampling. We evaluate JPQ on two publicly available retrieval benchmarks. Experimental results show that JPQ significantly outperforms popular vector compression methods. Compared with previous DR models that use brute-force search, JPQ almost matches the best retrieval performance with 30x compression on index size. The compressed index further brings 10x speedup on CPU and 2x speedup on GPU in query latency.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Optimizing Dense Retrieval Model Training with Hard Negatives

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval researches. For decades, the lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but solely using this signal in retrieval may cause the vocabulary mismatch problem. In recent years, with the development of representation learning techniques, many researchers turn to Dense Retrieval (DR) models for better ranking performance. Although several existing DR models have already obtained promising results, their performance improvement heavily relies on the sampling of training examples. Many effective sampling strategies are not efficient enough for practical usage, and for most of them, there still lacks theoretical analysis in how and why performance improvement happens. To shed light on these research questions, we theoretically investigate different training strategies for DR models and try to explain why hard negative sampling performs better than random sampling. Through the analysis, we also find that there are many potential risks in static hard negative sampling, which is employed by many existing training methods. Therefore, we propose two training strategies named a Stable Training Algorithm for dense Retrieval (STAR) and a query-side training Algorithm for Directly Optimizing Ranking pErformance (ADORE), respectively. STAR improves the stability of DR training process by introducing random negatives. ADORE replaces the widely-adopted static hard negative sampling method with a dynamic one to directly optimize the ranking performance. Experimental results on two publicly available retrieval benchmark datasets show that either strategy gains significant improvements over existing competitive baselines and a combination of them leads to the best performance.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

THUIR@COLIEE-2020: Leveraging Semantic Understanding and Exact Matching for Legal Case Retrieval and Entailment

In this paper, we present our methodologies for tackling the challenges of legal case retrieval and entailment in the Competition on Legal Information Extraction / Entailment 2020 (COLIEE-2020). We participated in the two case law tasks, i.e., the legal case retrieval task and the legal case entailment task. Task 1 (the retrieval task) aims to automatically identify supporting cases from the case law corpus given a new case, and Task 2 (the entailment task) to identify specific paragraphs that entail the decision of a new case in a relevant case. In both tasks, we employed the neural models for semantic understanding and the traditional retrieval models for exact matching. As a result, our team (TLIR) ranked 2nd among all of the teams in Task 1 and 3rd among teams in Task 2. Experimental results suggest that combing models of semantic understanding and exact matching benefits the legal case retrieval task while the legal case entailment task relies more on semantic understanding.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Unbiased Learning to Rank: Online or Offline?

How to obtain an unbiased ranking model by learning to rank with biased user feedback is an important research question for IR. Existing work on unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) can be broadly categorized into two groups -- the studies on unbiased learning algorithms with logged data, namely the \textit{offline} unbiased learning, and the studies on unbiased parameters estimation with real-time user interactions, namely the \textit{online} learning to rank. While their definitions of \textit{unbiasness} are different, these two types of ULTR algorithms share the same goal -- to find the best models that rank documents based on their intrinsic relevance or utility. However, most studies on offline and online unbiased learning to rank are carried in parallel without detailed comparisons on their background theories and empirical performance. In this paper, we formalize the task of unbiased learning to rank and show that existing algorithms for offline unbiased learning and online learning to rank are just the two sides of the same coin. We evaluate six state-of-the-art ULTR algorithms and find that most of them can be used in both offline settings and online environments with or without minor modifications. Further, we analyze how different offline and online learning paradigms would affect the theoretical foundation and empirical effectiveness of each algorithm on both synthetic and real search data. Our findings could provide important insights and guideline for choosing and deploying ULTR algorithms in practice.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Learning To Retrieve: How to Train a Dense Retrieval Model Effectively and Efficiently

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval research. For decades, lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but it also has inherent defects, such as the vocabulary mismatch problem. Recently, Dense Retrieval (DR) technique has been proposed to alleviate these limitations by capturing the deep semantic relationship between queries and documents. The training of most existing Dense Retrieval models relies on sampling negative instances from the corpus to optimize a pairwise loss function. Through investigation, we find that this kind of training strategy is biased and fails to optimize full retrieval performance effectively and efficiently. To solve this problem, we propose a Learning To Retrieve (LTRe) training technique. LTRe constructs the document index beforehand. At each training iteration, it performs full retrieval without negative sampling and then updates the query representation model parameters. Through this process, it teaches the DR model how to retrieve relevant documents from the entire corpus instead of how to rerank a potentially biased sample of documents. Experiments in both passage retrieval and document retrieval tasks show that: 1) in terms of effectiveness, LTRe significantly outperforms all competitive sparse and dense baselines. It even gains better performance than the BM25-BERT cascade system under reasonable latency constraints. 2) in terms of training efficiency, compared with the previous state-of-the-art DR method, LTRe provides more than 170x speed-up in the training process. Training with a compressed index further saves computing resources with minor performance loss.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Neural Logic Reasoning

Recent years have witnessed the success of deep neural networks in many research areas. The fundamental idea behind the design of most neural networks is to learn similarity patterns from data for prediction and inference, which lacks the ability of cognitive reasoning. However, the concrete ability of reasoning is critical to many theoretical and practical problems. On the other hand, traditional symbolic reasoning methods do well in making logical inference, but they are mostly hard rule-based reasoning, which limits their generalization ability to different tasks since difference tasks may require different rules. Both reasoning and generalization ability are important for prediction tasks such as recommender systems, where reasoning provides strong connection between user history and target items for accurate prediction, and generalization helps the model to draw a robust user portrait over noisy inputs. In this paper, we propose Logic-Integrated Neural Network (LINN) to integrate the power of deep learning and logic reasoning. LINN is a dynamic neural architecture that builds the computational graph according to input logical expressions. It learns basic logical operations such as AND, OR, NOT as neural modules, and conducts propositional logical reasoning through the network for inference. Experiments on theoretical task show that LINN achieves significant performance on solving logical equations and variables. Furthermore, we test our approach on the practical task of recommendation by formulating the task into a logical inference problem. Experiments show that LINN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation models in Top-K recommendation, which verifies the potential of LINN in practice.

cs.LG↗