Passage re-ranking is to obtain a permutation over the candidate passage set from retrieval stage. Re-rankers have been boomed by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) due to their overwhelming advantages in natural language understanding. However, existing PLM based re-rankers may easily suffer from vocabulary mismatch and lack of domain specific knowledge. To alleviate these problems, explicit knowledge contained in knowledge graph is carefully introduced in our work. Specifically, we employ the existing knowledge graph which is incomplete and noisy, and first apply it in passage re-ranking task. To leverage a reliable knowledge, we propose a novel knowledge graph distillation method and obtain a knowledge meta graph as the bridge between query and passage. To align both kinds of embedding in the latent space, we employ PLM as text encoder and graph neural network over knowledge meta graph as knowledge encoder. Besides, a novel knowledge injector is designed for the dynamic interaction between text and knowledge encoder. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method especially in queries requiring in-depth domain knowledge.

Abstract BERT-based ranking models are emerging for its superior natural language understanding ability. All word relations and representations in the concatenation of query and document are modeled in the self-attention matrix as latent knowledge. However, some latent knowledge has none or negative effect on the relevance prediction between query and document. We model the observable and unobservable confounding factors in a causal graph and perform do-query to predict the relevance label given an intervention over this graph. For the observed factors, we block the back door path by an adaptive masking method through the transformer layer and refine word representations over this disentangled word graph through the refinement layer. For the unobserved factors, we resolve the do-operation query from the front door path by decomposing word representations into query related and unrelated parts through the decomposition layer. Pairwise ranking loss is mainly used for the ad hoc document ranking task, triangle distance loss is introduced to both the transformer and refinement layers for more discriminative representations, and mutual information constraints are put on the decomposition layer. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets TREC Robust04 and WebTrack2009-12 show that DGRe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines more than 2% especially for short queries.

Given a legal case and all law articles, L egal J udgment P rediction (LJP) is to predict the case's violated articles, charges and term of penalty. Naturally, these labels are entangled among different tasks and within a task. For example, each charge is only logically or semantically related to some fixed articles. Ignoring these constraints, LJP methods would predict unreliable results. To solve this problem, we first formalize LJP as a node classification problem over a global consistency graph derived from the training set. In terms of node encoder, we utilize a masked transformer network to obtain case aware node representations consistent among tasks and discriminative within a task. In terms of node classifier, each node's label distribution is dependent on its neighbors' in this graph to achieve local consistency by relational learning. Both the node encoder and classifier are optimized by variational EM. Finally, we propose a novel measure to evaluate self-consistency of classification results. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the F1 improvement of our method is about $4.8%$ compared with SOTA methods.

Dialogue Relation Extraction (DRE) is a new kind of relation extraction task from multi-turn dialogues. Different from the previous tasks, speaker specific relations are implicitly mixed together in both a local utterance window and a speaker context. To tackle both local and speaker dependency challenges, we explicitly construct a unified mention co-occurrence graph within a local utterance window or all utterances of a speaker from different entities. For each dialogue, a position enhanced graph attention network over this graph is proposed to obtain position aware mention representations in terms of both contexts. A gate function is utilized to help obtain a discriminative representation enough for each relation from original and position aware mention representations. For each entity pair in this dialogue, a pairwise attention mechanism is deployed to aggregate those discriminative mention representations as pair representation, which is fed into a standard multi-label classifier for relation label prediction. Experimental results on two benchmarks show the performance improvement of the proposed method is at least 1.6% and 3.2% compared with SOTA.

Automatic crime classification is a fundamental task in the legal field. Given the fact descriptions, judges first determine the relevant violated laws, and then the articles. As laws and articles are grouped into a tree-shaped hierarchy (i.e., laws as parent labels, articles as children labels), this task can be naturally formalized as a two layers' hierarchical multi-label classification problem. Generally, the label semantics (i.e., definition of articles) and the hierarchical structure are two informative properties for judges to make a correct decision. However, most previous methods usually ignore the label structure and feed all labels into a flat classification framework, or neglect the label semantics and only utilize fact descriptions for crime classification, thus the performance may be limited. In this paper, we formalize crime classification problem into a matching task to address these issues. We name our model as Hierarchical Matching Network (HMN for short). Based on the tree hierarchy, HMN explicitly decomposes the semantics of children labels into the residual and alignment components. The residual components keep the unique characteristics of each individual children label, while the alignment components capture the common semantics among sibling children labels, which are further aggregated as the representation of their parent label. Finally, given a fact description, a co-attention metric is applied to effectively match the relevant laws and articles. Experiments on two real-world judicial datasets demonstrate that our model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Recurrent Neural Networks have been successful in learning meaningful representations from sequence data, such as text and speech. However, recurrent neural networks attempt to model only the overall structure of each sequence independently, which is unsuitable for recommendations. In recommendation system, an optimal model should not only capture the global structure, but also the localized relationships. This poses a great challenge in the application of recurrent neural networks to the sequence prediction problem. To tackle this challenge, we incorporate the neighbor sequences into recurrent neural networks to help detect local relationships. Thus we propose a K -plet R ecurrent Neural Network (Kr Network for short) to accommodate multiple sequences jointly, and then introduce two ways to model their interactions between sequences. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our proposed architecture Kr Network outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of generalization, short-term and long term prediction accuracy.

In juridical field, judges usually need to consult several relevant cases to determine the specific articles that the evidence violated, which is a task that is time consuming and needs extensive professional knowledge. In this paper, we focus on how to save the manual efforts and make the conviction process more efficient. Specifically, we treat the evidences as documents, and articles as labels, thus the conviction process can be cast as a multi-label classification problem. However, the challenge in this specific scenario lies in two aspects. One is that the number of articles that evidences violated is dynamic, which we denote as the label dynamic problem. The other is that most articles are violated by only a few of the evidences, which we denote as the label imbalance problem. Previous methods usually learn the multi-label classification model and the label thresholds independently, and may ignore the label imbalance problem. To tackle with both challenges, we propose a unified D ynamic P airwise A ttention M odel (DPAM for short) in this paper. Specifically, DPAM adopts the multi-task learning paradigm to learn the multi-label classifier and the threshold predictor jointly, and thus DPAM can improve the generalization performance by leveraging the information learned in both of the two tasks. In addition, a pairwise attention model based on article definitions is incorporated into the classification model to help alleviate the label imbalance problem. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods.

With the surge of deep learning, more and more attention has been put on the sequential recommender. It can be casted as sequence prediction problem, where we will predict the next item given the previous items. RNN approaches are able to capture the global sequential features from the data compared with the local features derived in Markov Chain methods. However, both approaches rely on the independence of users' sequences, which are not true in practice. We propose to formulate the sequential recommendation problem as collaborative sequence prediction problem to take the dependency of users' sequences into account. In order to solve the collaborative sequence prediction problem, we define the dynamic neighborhood relationship between users and introduce manifold regularization to RNN on the basis of the multi-facets of collaborative filtering, referred to as MrRNN. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

Inferring a gold-standard ranking over a set of objects, such as documents or images, is a key task to build test collections for various applications like Web search and recommender systems. Crowdsourcing services provide an efficient and inexpensive way to collect judgments via labeling by sets of annotators. We thus study the problem of finding a consensus ranking from crowdsourced judgments. In contrast to conventional rank aggregation methods which minimize the distance between predicted ranking and input judgments from either pointwise or pairwise perspective, we argue that it is critical to consider the distance in a listwise way to emphasize the position importance in ranking. Therefore, we introduce a new listwise approach in this paper, where ranking measure based objective functions are utilized for optimization. In addition, we also incorporate the annotator quality into our model since the reliability of annotators can vary significantly in crowdsourcing. For optimization, we transform the optimization problem to the Linear Sum Assignment Problem, and then solve it by a very efficient algorithm named CrowdAgg guaranteeing the optimal solution. Experimental results on two benchmark data sets from different crowdsourcing tasks show that our algorithm is much more effective, efficient and robust than traditional methods.

When applying learning to rank algorithms in real search applications, noise in human labeled training data becomes an inevitable problem which will affect the performance of the algorithms. Previous work mainly focused on studying how noise affects ranking algorithms and how to design robust ranking algorithms. In our work, we investigate what inherent characteristics make training data robust to label noise. The motivation of our work comes from an interesting observation that a same ranking algorithm may show very different sensitivities to label noise over different data sets. We thus investigate the underlying reason for this observation based on two typical kinds of learning to rank algorithms (i.e.~pairwise and listwise methods) and three different public data sets (i.e.~OHSUMED, TD2003 and MSLR-WEB10K). We find that when label noise increases in training data, it is the \emph{document pair noise ratio} (i.e.~\emph{pNoise}) rather than \emph{document noise ratio} (i.e.~\emph{dNoise}) that can well explain the performance degradation of a ranking algorithm.

Search result diversification has gained attention as a way to tackle the ambiguous or multi-faceted information needs of users. Most existing methods on this problem utilize a heuristic predefined ranking function, where limited features can be incorporated and extensive tuning is required for different settings. In this paper, we address search result diversification as a learning problem, and introduce a novel relational learning-to-rank approach to formulate the task. However, the definitions of ranking function and loss function for the diversification problem are challenging. In our work, we firstly show that diverse ranking is in general a sequential selection process from both empirical and theoretical aspects. On this basis, we define ranking function as the combination of relevance score and diversity score between the current document and those previously selected, and loss function as the likelihood loss of ground truth based on Plackett-Luce model, which can naturally model the sequential generation of a diverse ranking list. Stochastic gradient descent is then employed to conduct the unconstrained optimization, and the prediction of a diverse ranking list is provided by a sequential selection process based on the learned ranking function. The experimental results on the public TREC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Recently,`top-k learning to rank' has attracted much attention in the community of information retrieval. The motivation comes from the difficulty in obtaining a full-order ranking list for training, when employing reliable pairwise preference judgment. Inspired by the observation that users mainly care about top ranked search result, top-k learning to rank proposes to utilize top-k ground-truth for training, where only the total order of top k items are provided, instead of a full-order ranking list. However, it is not clear whether the underlying assumption holds, i.e. top-k ground-truth is sufficient for training. In this paper, we propose to study this problem from both empirical and theoretical aspects. Empirically, our experimental results on benchmark datasets LETOR4.0 show that the test performances of both pairwise and listwise ranking algorithms will quickly increase to a stable value, with the growth of k in the top-k ground-truth. Theoretically, we prove that the losses of these typical ranking algorithms in top-k setting are tighter upper bounds of (1--NDCG@k), compared with that in full-order setting. Therefore, our studies reveal that learning on top-k ground-truth is surely sufficient for ranking, which lay a foundation for the new learning to rank framework.

This paper is concerned with top-k ranking problem, which reflects the fact that people pay more attention to the top ranked objects in real ranking application like information retrieval. A popular approach to top-k ranking problem is based on probabilistic models, such as Luce model and Mallows model. However, whether the sequential generative process described in these models is a suitable way for top-k ranking remains a question. According to the riffled independence factorization proposed in recent literature, which is a natural structural assumption on top-k ranking, we propose a new generative process of top-k ranking data. Our approach decomposes distributions over the top-k ranking into two layers: the first layer describes the relative ordering between the top k objects and the rest n-k objects, and the second layer describes the full ordering on the top k objects. On this basis, we propose a new probabilistic model for top-k ranking problem, called hierarchical ordering model. Specifically, we use three different probabilistic models to describe different generative processes of the first layer, and Luce model to describe the sequential generative process of the second layer, thus we obtain three different specific hierarchical ordering models. We also conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets to show that our proposed models can outperform previous models significantly.

In this paper, we propose a novel top-k learning to rank framework, which involves labeling strategy, ranking model and evaluation measure. The motivation comes from the difficulty in obtaining reliable relevance judgments from human assessors when applying learning to rank in real search systems. The traditional absolute relevance judgment method is difficult in both gradation specification and human assessing, resulting in high level of disagreement on judgments. While the pairwise preference judgment, as a good alternative, is often criticized for increasing the complexity of judgment from O(n) to (n log n). Considering the fact that users mainly care about top ranked search results, we propose a novel top-k labeling strategy which adopts the pairwise preference judgment to generate the top k ordering items from n documents (i.e. top-k ground-truth) in a manner similar to that of HeapSort. As a result, the complexity of judgment is reduced to O(n log k). With the top-k ground-truth, traditional ranking models (e.g. pairwise or listwise models) and evaluation measures (e.g. NDCG) no longer fit the data set. Therefore, we introduce a new ranking model, namely FocusedRank, which fully captures the characteristics of the top-k ground-truth. We also extend the widely used evaluation measures NDCG and ERR to be applicable to the top-k ground-truth, referred as κ-NDCG and κ-ERR, respectively. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on benchmark data collections to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our top-k labeling strategy and ranking models.