Passage ranking involves two stages: passage retrieval and passage re-ranking, which are important and challenging topics for both academics and industries in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the commonly-used datasets for passage ranking usually focus on the English language. For non-English scenarios, such as Chinese, the existing datasets are limited in terms of data scale, fine-grained relevance annotation and false negative issues. To address this problem, we introduce T2Ranking, a large-scale Chinese benchmark for passage ranking. T2Ranking comprises more than 300K queries and over 2M unique passages from real-world search engines. Expert annotators are recruited to provide 4-level graded relevance scores (fine-grained) for query-passage pairs instead of binary relevance judgments (coarse-grained). To ease the false negative issues, more passages with higher diversities are considered when performing relevance annotations, especially in the test set, to ensure a more accurate evaluation. Apart from the textual query and passage data, other auxiliary resources are also provided, such as query types and XML files of documents which passages are generated from, to facilitate further studies. To evaluate the dataset, commonly used ranking models are implemented and tested on T2Ranking as baselines. The experimental results show that T2Ranking is challenging and there is still scope for improvement. The full data and all codes are available at https://github.com/THUIR/T2Ranking/.

Visual question answering is an important task in both natural language and vision understanding. However, in most of the public visual question answering datasets such as VQA, CLEVR, the questions are human generated that specific to the given image, such as 'What color are her eyes?'. The human generated crowdsourcing questions are relatively simple and sometimes have the bias toward certain entities or attributes [1, 55].

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding aims to encode entities and relations into low-dimensional vector spaces, in turn, can support various machine learning models on KG related tasks with good performance. However, existing methods for knowledge graph embedding fail to consider the influence of the embedding space, which makes them still unsatisfactory in practical applications. In this study, we try to improve the expressiveness of the embedding space from the perspective of the metric. Specifically, we first point out the implications of Minkowski metric used in KG embedding and then make a quantitative analysis. To solve the limitations, we introduce a new metric, named Cycle metric, based on the oscillation property of the periodic function. Furthermore, we find that the function period has a significant influence on the expressiveness of the embedding space. Given a fully trained model, the smaller the period, the better the expressive ability. Finally, to validate the findings, we propose a new model, named CyclE by combining Cycle Metric and the popular KG embeddings models. Comprehensive experimental results show that Cycle is more appropriate than Minkowski for KG embedding.

With the development of deep learning techniques and large scale datasets, the question answering (QA) systems have been quickly improved, providing more accurate and satisfying answers. However, current QA systems either focus on the sentence-level answer, i.e., answer selection, or phrase-level answer, i.e., machine reading comprehension. How to produce compositional answers has not been throughout investigated. In compositional question answering, the systems should assemble several supporting evidence from the document to generate the final answer, which is more difficult than sentence-level or phrase-level QA. In this paper, we present a large-scale compositional question answering dataset containing more than 120k human-labeled questions. The answer in this dataset is composed of discontiguous sentences in the corresponding document. To tackle the ComQA problem, we proposed a hierarchical graph neural networks, which represent the document from the low-level word to the high-level sentence. We also devise a question selection and node selection task for pre-training. Our proposed model achieves a significant improvement over previous machine reading comprehension methods and pre-training methods. Codes, dataset can be found at https://github.com/benywon/ComQA.

Open-domain question answering focuses on using diverse information resources to answer any types of question. Recent years, with the development of large-scale data set and various deep neural networks models, some recent advances in open domain question answering system first utilize the distantly supervised dataset as the knowledge resource, then apply deep learning based machine comprehension techniques to generate the right answers, which achieves impressive results compared with traditional feature-based pipeline methods.

With the amount of data has been rapidly growing over recent decades, binary hashing has become an attractive approach for fast search over large databases, in which the high-dimensional data such as image, video or text is mapped into a low-dimensional binary code. Searching in this hamming space is extremely efficient which is independent of the data size. A lot of methods have been proposed to learn this binary mapping. However, to make the binary codes conserves the input information, previous works mostly resort to mean squared error, which is prone to lose a lot of input information [11]. On the other hand, most of the previous works adopt the norm constraint or approximation on the hidden representation to make it as close as possible to binary, but the norm constraint is too strict that harms the expressiveness and flexibility of the code.