There is currently a controversy as to whether LLM-based relevance assessment can replace manual relevance assessment for evaluating search engines accurately at least at the run level (e.g., ranking TREC runs by mean nDCG) if not at the individual topic level (e.g., computing an nDCG score for a Search Engine Result Page). This study utilises an NTCIR web search test collection that features highly reliable human relevance labels (reflecting the collective view of eight independent assessors per topic) to complement prior findings from the skeptic camp. Our experiments show that LLM-based assessment (using Llama and Qwen) cannot replace human assessment even for ranking systems in terms of mean nDCG. More importantly, LLM-based assessment lacks discriminative power: it misses many statistically significant differences that manual assessment can detect. Furthermore, LLM-based assessment occasionally yields potential false alarms in terms of statistical significance, which may let researchers reach incorrect conclusions.

Query reformulation is a key mechanism to alleviate the linguistic chasm of query in ad-hoc retrieval. Among various solutions, query reduction effectively removes extraneous terms and specifies concise user intent from long queries. However, it is challenging to capture hidden and diverse user intent. This paper proposes Contextualized Query Reduction (ConQueR) using a pre-trained language model (PLM). Specifically, it reduces verbose queries with two different views: core term extraction and sub-query selection. One extracts core terms from an original query at the term level, and the other determines whether a sub-query is a suitable reduction for the original query at the sequence level. Since they operate at different levels of granularity and complement each other, they are finally aggregated in an ensemble manner. We evaluate the reduction quality of ConQueR on real-world search logs collected from a commercial web search engine. It achieves up to 8.45% gains in exact match scores over the best competing model.

Sparse document representations have been widely used to retrieve relevant documents via exact lexical matching. Owing to the pre-computed inverted index, it supports fast ad-hoc search but incurs the vocabulary mismatch problem. Although recent neural ranking models using pre-trained language models can address this problem, they usually require expensive query inference costs, implying the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. Tackling the trade-off, we propose a novel uni-encoder ranking model, Sparse retriever using a Dual document Encoder (SpaDE), learning document representation via the dual encoder. Each encoder plays a central role in (i) adjusting the importance of terms to improve lexical matching and (ii) expanding additional terms to support semantic matching. Furthermore, our co-training strategy trains the dual encoder effectively and avoids unnecessary intervention in training each other. Experimental results on several benchmarks show that SpaDE outperforms existing uni-encoder ranking models.

We study keyphrase extraction (KPE) from Web documents. Our key contribution is encoding Web documents to leverage structure, such as title or anchors, by building a graph of words representing both (a) position-based proximity and (b) structural relations. We evaluate KPE performance on real-world search engine NAVER and human-annotated KPE benchmarks, and ours outperforms state-of-the-arts in both tasks.

Recently, unbiased learning-to-rank models have been widely studied to learn a better ranker by eliminating the biases from click data. Toward this goal, existing work mainly focused on estimating the propensity weight to design a specific bias type from click data. From a different perspective, we propose a simple-yet-effective ranking model, namely wLambdaMART, which estimates the confidence of click data with a few labeled data, instead of learning the propensity weight to reduce the bias from click data. We first train a confidence estimator to bridge the gap between biased click data and unbiased relevance. Then, we infer confidence weights for all click data and apply them to LambdaMART to learn a debiased ranker. Practically, since it is found that learning the confidence estimator only requires a few labeled data, it does not incur high labeling costs. Our experimental results show that wLambdaMART outperforms state-of-the-art click models and unbiased learning-to-rank models on the real-world click datasets collected from a commercial search engine.

In this paper, we consider the problem of linking users across multiple online communities. Specifically, we focus on the alias-disambiguation step of this user linking task, which is meant to differentiate users with the same usernames. We start quantitatively analyzing the importance of the alias-disambiguation step by conducting a survey on 153 volunteers and an experimental analysis on a large dataset of About.me (75,472 users). The analysis shows that the alias-disambiguation solution can address a major part of the user linking problem in terms of the coverage of true pairwise decisions (46.8%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on human behaviors with regards to the usages of online usernames. We then cast the alias-disambiguation step as a pairwise classification problem and propose a novel unsupervised approach. The key idea of our approach is to automatically label training instances based on two observations: (a) rare usernames are likely owned by a single natural person, e.g. pennystar88 as a positive instance; (b) common usernames are likely owned by different natural persons, e.g. tank as a negative instance. We propose using the n-gram probabilities of usernames to estimate the rareness or commonness of usernames. Moreover, these two observations are verified by using the dataset of Yahoo! Answers. The empirical evaluations on 53 forums verify: (a) the effectiveness of the classifiers with the automatically generated training data and (b) that the rareness and commonness of usernames can help user linking. We also analyze the cases where the classifiers fail.

This paper addresses the problem of mining named entity translations from comparable corpora, specifically, mining English and Chinese named entity translation. We first observe that existing approaches use one or more of the following named entity similarity metrics: entity, entity context, and relationship. Motivated by this observation, we propose a new holistic approach by 1) combining all similarity types used and 2) additionally considering relationship context similarity between pairs of named entities, a missing quadrant in the taxonomy of similarity metrics. We abstract the named entity translation problem as the matching of two named entity graphs extracted from the comparable corpora. Specifically, named entity graphs are first constructed from comparable corpora to extract relationship between named entities. Entity similarity and entity context similarity are then calculated from every pair of bilingual named entities. A reinforcing method is utilized to reflect relationship similarity and relationship context similarity between named entities. We also discover "latent" features lost in the graph extraction process and integrate this into our framework. According to our experimental results, our holistic graph-based approach and its enhancement using corpus latent features are highly effective and our framework significantly outperforms previous approaches.

Comparing one thing with another is a typical part of human decision making process. However, it is not always easy to know what to compare and what are the alternatives. In this paper, we present a novel way to automatically mine comparable entities from comparative questions that users posted online to address this difficulty. To ensure high precision and high recall, we develop a weakly supervised bootstrapping approach for comparative question identification and comparable entity extraction by leveraging a large collection of online question archive. The experimental results show our method achieves F1-measure of 82.5 percent in comparative question identification and 83.3 percent in comparable entity extraction. Both significantly outperform an existing state-of-the-art method. Additionally, our ranking results show highly relevance to user's comparison intents in web.

This article studies the problem of mining entity translation, specifically, mining English and Chinese name pairs. Existing efforts can be categorized into (a) transliteration-based approaches that leverage phonetic similarity and (b) corpus-based approaches that exploit bilingual cooccurrences. These approaches suffer from inaccuracy and scarcity, respectively. In clear contrast, we use under-leveraged resources of monolingual entity cooccurrences crawled from entity search engines, which are represented as two entity-relationship graphs extracted from two language corpora, respectively. Our problem is then abstracted as finding correct mappings across two graphs. To achieve this goal, we propose a holistic approach to exploiting both transliteration similarity and monolingual cooccurrences. This approach, which builds upon monolingual corpora, complements existing corpus-based work requiring scarce resources of parallel or comparable corpus while significantly boosting the accuracy of transliteration-based work. In addition, by parallelizing the mapping process on multicore architectures, we speed up the computation by more than 10 times per unit accuracy. We validated the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach using real-life datasets.

This paper addresses the problem of mining named entity translations from comparable corpora, specifically, mining English and Chinese named entity translation. We first observe that existing approaches use one or more of the following named entity similarity metrics: entity, entity context, and relationship. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we propose a new holistic approach, by (1) combining all similarity types used and (2) additionally considering relationship context similarity between pairs of named entities, a missing quadrant in the taxonomy of similarity metrics. We abstract the named entity translation problem as the matching of two named entity graphs extracted from the comparable corpora. Specifically, named entity graphs are first constructed from comparable corpora to extract relationship between named entities. Entity similarity and entity context similarity are then calculated from every pair of bilingual named entities. A reinforcing method is utilized to reflect relationship similarity and relationship context similarity between named entities. According to our experimental results, our holistic graph-based approach significantly outperforms previous approaches.

We define Direct Information Access as a type of information access where there is no user operation such as clicking or scrolling between the user's click on the search button and the user's information acquisition; we define Immediate Information Access as a type of information access where the user can locate the relevant information within the system output very quickly. Hence, a Direct and Immediate Information Access (DIIA) system is expected to satisfy the user's information need very quickly with its very first response. We propose a nugget-based evaluation framework for DIIA, which takes nugget positions into account in order to evaluate the ability of a system to present important nuggets first and to minimise the amount of text the user has to read. To demonstrate the integrity, usefulness and limitations of our framework, we built a Japanese DIIA test collection with 60 queries and over 2,800 nuggets as well as an offset-based nugget match evaluation interface, and conducted experiments with manual and automatic runs. The results suggest our proposal is a useful complement to traditional ranked retrieval evaluation based on document relevance.

In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the relative expertise score of users in community question and answering services (CQA). Previous approaches typically only utilize the explicit question answering relationship between askers and an-swerers and apply link analysis to address this problem. The im-plicit pairwise comparison between two users that is implied in the best answer selection is ignored. Given a question and answering thread, it's likely that the expertise score of the best answerer is higher than the asker's and all other non-best answerers'. The goal of this paper is to explore such pairwise comparisons inferred from best answer selections to estimate the relative expertise scores of users. Formally, we treat each pairwise comparison between two users as a two-player competition with one winner and one loser. Two competition models are proposed to estimate user expertise from pairwise comparisons. Using the NTCIR-8 CQA task data with 3 million questions and introducing answer quality prediction based evaluation metrics, the experimental results show that the pairwise comparison based competition model significantly outperforms link analysis based approaches (PageRank and HITS) and pointwise approaches (number of best answers and best answer ratio) for estimating the expertise of active users. Furthermore, it's shown that pairwise comparison based competi-tion models have better discriminative power than other methods. It's also found that answer quality (best answer) is an important factor to estimate user expertise.

Opinion retrieval involves the measuring of opinion score of a document about the given topic. We propose a new method, namely sentiment-relevance flow, that naturally unifies the topic relevance and the opinionated nature of a document. Experiments conducted over a large-scaled Web corpus show that the proposed approach improves performance of opinion retrieval in terms of precision at top ranks.

Most traditional ranking models roughly score the relevance of a given document by observing simple term statistics, such as the occurrence of query terms within the document or within the collection. Intuitively, the relative importance of query terms with regard to other individual non-query terms in a document can also be exploited to promote the ranks of documents in which the query is dedicated as the main topic. In this paper, we introduce a simple technique named intra-document term ranking, which involves ranking all the terms in a document according to their relative importance within that particular document. We demonstrate that the information regarding the rank positions of given query terms within the intra-document term ranking can be useful for enhancing the precision of top-retrieved results by traditional ranking models. Experiments are conducted on three standard TREC test collections.

At community question answering services, users are usually encouraged to rate questions by votes. The questions with the most votes are then recommended and ranked on the top when users browse questions by category. As users are not obligated to rate questions, usually only a small proportion of questions eventually gets rating. Thus, in this paper, we are concerned with learning to recommend questions from user ratings of a limited size. To overcome the data sparsity, we propose to utilize questions without users rating as well. Further, as there exist certain noises within user ratings (the preference of some users expressed in their ratings diverges from that of the majority of users), we design a new algorithm called 'majority-based perceptron algorithm' which can avoid the influence of noisy instances by emphasizing its learning over data instances from the majority users. Experimental results from a large collection of real questions confirm the effectiveness of our proposals.

A key to success to contextual in-video advertising is finding advertising keywords on video contents effectively, but there has been little literature in the area so far. This paper presents some preliminary results of our learning-based system that finds relevant advertising keywords on particular scene of video contents using their scripts. The system is trained with not only features proven useful in earlier studies but novel features that reflect the situation of a targeted scene. Experimental results show that the new features are potentially helpful for enhancing the accuracy of keyword extraction for contextual in-video advertising.

Online forums contain a huge amount of valuable user generated content. In this paper we address the problem of extracting question-answer pairs from forums. Question-answer pairs extracted from forums can be used to help Question Answering services (e.g. Yahoo! Answers) among other applications. We propose a sequential patterns based classification method to detect questions in a forum thread, and a graph based propagation method to detect answers for questions in the same thread. Experimental results show that our techniques are very promising.

This paper proposes a probabilistic model for definitional question answering (QA) that reflects the characteristics of the definitional question. The intention of the definitional question is to request the definition about the question target. Therefore, an answer for the definitional question should contain the content relevant to the topic of the target, and have a representation form of the definition style. Modeling the problem of definitional QA from both the topic and definition viewpoints, the proposed probabilistic model converts the task of answering the definitional questions into that of estimating the three language models: topic language model, definition language model, and general language model. The proposed model systematically combines several evidences in a probabilistic framework. Experimental results show that a definitional QA system based on the proposed probabilistic model is comparable to state-of-the-art systems.