arXiv subjects

Roberto Konow

Publications and source records attributed to Roberto Konow.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Advancing Relevance Measurement with Vision-Language Models for Web-Scale Search

Relevance evaluation plays a crucial role in personalized search systems, serving as a guardrail alongside user engagement metrics to ensure that search results align with user queries and intent. While human annotation is the traditional method for relevance evaluation, its high cost and long turnaround time limit its scalability. In this work, we present a VLM-based automated relevance evaluation pipeline deployed within Pinterest Search for online A/B experiments. We rigorously validate the alignment between VLM-generated judgments and human annotations, demonstrating that VLMs can provide reliable relevance measurement for experiments while greatly improving the evaluation efficiency. Leveraging VLM-based labeling further unlocks opportunities to expand the query set, optimize sampling design, and efficiently assess a wider range of search experiences at scale. This approach leads to higher-quality relevance metrics and significantly reduces the Minimum Detectable Effects (MDEs) in online experiment measurements.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

Spelling Correction as a Foreign Language

In this paper, we reformulated the spell correction problem as a machine translation task under the encoder-decoder framework. This reformulation enabled us to use a single model for solving the problem that is traditionally formulated as learning a language model and an error model. This model employs multi-layer recurrent neural networks as an encoder and a decoder. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this model using an internal dataset, where the training data is automatically obtained from user logs. The model offers competitive performance as compared to the state of the art methods but does not require any feature engineering nor hand tuning between models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Aggregated 2D Range Queries on Clustered Points

Efficient processing of aggregated range queries on two-dimensional grids is a common requirement in information retrieval and data mining systems, for example in Geographic Information Systems and OLAP cubes. We introduce a technique to represent grids supporting aggregated range queries that requires little space when the data points in the grid are clustered, which is common in practice. We show how this general technique can be used to support two important types of aggregated queries, which are ranked range queries and counting range queries. Our experimental evaluation shows that this technique can speed up aggregated queries up to more than an order of magnitude, with a small space overhead.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2012

Faster Compact Top-k Document Retrieval

An optimal index solving top-k document retrieval [Navarro and Nekrich, SODA12] takes O(m + k) time for a pattern of length m, but its space is at least 80n bytes for a collection of n symbols. We reduce it to 1.5n to 3n bytes, with O(m+(k+log log n) log log n) time, on typical texts. The index is up to 25 times faster than the best previous compressed solutions, and requires at most 5% more space in practice (and in some cases as little as one half). Apart from replacing classical by compressed data structures, our main idea is to replace suffix tree sampling by frequency thresholding to achieve compression.

cs.DS↗