Tutorials

The Role of Entity Repositories in Information Retrieval

Marius Pasca

Web search queries may seek information on entities (“gary oldman”, “fifth element movie”) or lists of entities (“french science fiction movies”); or seek answers to fact-seeking questions (“who plays leeloo in the fifth element”, “director of the fifth element”) that may refer to or involve entities (Fifth Element, Milla Jovovich, Luc Besson). By finding relevant entities within queries and matching them to relevant text and entities within documents and other available textual data, search engines have been moving closer to returning results that are not just a set of links but more directly answer the queries. Such developments are made possible or supported by the availability of large-scale entity repositories, which capture salient attributes and properties of a variety of open-domain entities and explicitly connects them to other related entities. This tutorial reviews distinguishing characteristics and discusses applications of existing entity repositories in information retrieval.

Principle-to-program: neural methods for similar question retrieval in online communities

Muthusamy Chelliah, Manish Shrivastava, and Jaidam Ramtej

Similar question retrieval is a challenge due to lexical gap between query and candidates in archive and is very different from traditional IR methods for duplicate detection, paraphrase identification and semantic equivalence. This tutorial covers recent deep learning techniques which overcome feature engineering issues with existing approaches based on translation models and latent topics. Hands-on proposal thus will introduce each concept from end user (e.g., question-answer pairs) and technique (e.g., attention) perspectives, present state of the art methods and a walkthrough of programs executed on Jupyter notebook using real-world datasets demonstrating principles introduced.

Text Meets Space: Geographic Content Extraction, Resolution and Information Retrieval

Jochen L. Leidner, Bruno Martins, Katherine McDonough, and Ross S. Purves

In this full-day tutorial, we will review the basic concepts of, methods for, and applications of geographic information retrieval, also showing some possible applications in fields such as the digital humanities. The tutorial is organized in four parts. First we introduce some basic ideas about geography, and demonstrate why text is a powerful way of exploring relevant questions. We then introduce a basic end-to-end pipeline discussing geographic information in documents, spatial and multi-dimensional indexing, and spatial retrieval and spatial filtering. After showing a range of possible applications, we conclude with suggestions for future work in the area.