Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking


Book Description

The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing (NLP) applications.This book provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has been responsible for a paradigm shift in NLP, information retrieval (IR), and beyond. This book provides a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area. It covers a wide range of modern techniques, grouped into two high-level categories: transformer models that perform reranking in multi-stage architectures and dense retrieval techniques that perform ranking directly. Two themes pervade the book: techniques for handling long documents, beyond typical sentence-by-sentence processing in NLP, and techniques for addressing the tradeoff between effectiveness (i.e., result quality) and efficiency (e.g., query latency, model and index size). Although transformer architectures and pretraining techniques are recent innovations, many aspects of how they are applied to text ranking are relatively well understood and represent mature techniques. However, there remain many open research questions, and thus in addition to laying out the foundations of pretrained transformers for text ranking, this book also attempts to prognosticate where the field is heading.




Advances in Information Retrieval


Book Description

This two-volume set LNCS 12656 and 12657 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 43rd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2021, held virtually in March/April 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 50 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 39 short papers, 15 demonstration papers, 12 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 5 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 8 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 436 submissions. The accepted contributions cover the state of the art in IR: deep learning-based information retrieval techniques, use of entities and knowledge graphs, recommender systems, retrieval methods, information extraction, question answering, topic and prediction models, multimedia retrieval, and much more.




The Probabilistic Relevance Framework


Book Description

The Probabilistic Relevance Framework (PRF) is a formal framework for document retrieval, grounded in work done in the 1970-80s, which led to the development of one of the most successful text-retrieval algorithms, BM25. In recent years, research in the PRF has yielded new retrieval models capable of taking into account structure and link-graph information. Again, this has led to one of the most successful web-search and corporate-search algorithms, BM25F. The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and Beyond presents the PRF from a conceptual point of view, describing the probabilistic modelling assumptions behind the framework and the different ranking algorithms that result from its application: the binary independence model, relevance feedback models, BM25, BM25F. Besides presenting a full derivation of the PRF ranking algorithms, it provides many insights about document retrieval in general, and points to many open challenges in this area. It also discusses the relation between the PRF and other statistical models for IR, and covers some related topics, such as the use of non-textual features, and parameter optimization for models with free parameters. The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and Beyond is self-contained and accessible to anyone with basic knowledge of probability and inference




Natural Language Processing with Transformers, Revised Edition


Book Description

Since their introduction in 2017, transformers have quickly become the dominant architecture for achieving state-of-the-art results on a variety of natural language processing tasks. If you're a data scientist or coder, this practical book -now revised in full color- shows you how to train and scale these large models using Hugging Face Transformers, a Python-based deep learning library. Transformers have been used to write realistic news stories, improve Google Search queries, and even create chatbots that tell corny jokes. In this guide, authors Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra, and Thomas Wolf, among the creators of Hugging Face Transformers, use a hands-on approach to teach you how transformers work and how to integrate them in your applications. You'll quickly learn a variety of tasks they can help you solve. Build, debug, and optimize transformer models for core NLP tasks, such as text classification, named entity recognition, and question answering Learn how transformers can be used for cross-lingual transfer learning Apply transformers in real-world scenarios where labeled data is scarce Make transformer models efficient for deployment using techniques such as distillation, pruning, and quantization Train transformers from scratch and learn how to scale to multiple GPUs and distributed environments




An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval


Book Description

Efficient Query Processing for Scalable Web Search will be a valuable reference for researchers and developers working on This tutorial provides an accessible, yet comprehensive, overview of the state-of-the-art of Neural Information Retrieval.




Practical Weak Supervision


Book Description

Most data scientists and engineers today rely on quality labeled data to train machine learning models. But building a training set manually is time-consuming and expensive, leaving many companies with unfinished ML projects. There's a more practical approach. In this book, Wee Hyong Tok, Amit Bahree, and Senja Filipi show you how to create products using weakly supervised learning models. You'll learn how to build natural language processing and computer vision projects using weakly labeled datasets from Snorkel, a spin-off from the Stanford AI Lab. Because so many companies have pursued ML projects that never go beyond their labs, this book also provides a guide on how to ship the deep learning models you build. Get up to speed on the field of weak supervision, including ways to use it as part of the data science process Use Snorkel AI for weak supervision and data programming Get code examples for using Snorkel to label text and image datasets Use a weakly labeled dataset for text and image classification Learn practical considerations for using Snorkel with large datasets and using Spark clusters to scale labeling




Text Analytics with Python


Book Description

Derive useful insights from your data using Python. You will learn both basic and advanced concepts, including text and language syntax, structure, and semantics. You will focus on algorithms and techniques, such as text classification, clustering, topic modeling, and text summarization. Text Analytics with Python teaches you the techniques related to natural language processing and text analytics, and you will gain the skills to know which technique is best suited to solve a particular problem. You will look at each technique and algorithm with both a bird's eye view to understand how it can be used as well as with a microscopic view to understand the mathematical concepts and to implement them to solve your own problems. What You Will Learn: Understand the major concepts and techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics, including syntax and structure Build a text classification system to categorize news articles, analyze app or game reviews using topic modeling and text summarization, and cluster popular movie synopses and analyze the sentiment of movie reviews Implement Python and popular open source libraries in NLP and text analytics, such as the natural language toolkit (nltk), gensim, scikit-learn, spaCy and Pattern Who This Book Is For : IT professionals, analysts, developers, linguistic experts, data scientists, and anyone with a keen interest in linguistics, analytics, and generating insights from textual data




Getting Started with Google BERT


Book Description

Kickstart your NLP journey by exploring BERT and its variants such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, VideoBERT, and more with Hugging Face's transformers library Key FeaturesExplore the encoder and decoder of the transformer modelBecome well-versed with BERT along with ALBERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERTDiscover how to pre-train and fine-tune BERT models for several NLP tasksBook Description BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformer) has revolutionized the world of natural language processing (NLP) with promising results. This book is an introductory guide that will help you get to grips with Google's BERT architecture. With a detailed explanation of the transformer architecture, this book will help you understand how the transformer’s encoder and decoder work. You’ll explore the BERT architecture by learning how the BERT model is pre-trained and how to use pre-trained BERT for downstream tasks by fine-tuning it for NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis and text summarization with the Hugging Face transformers library. As you advance, you’ll learn about different variants of BERT such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA, and look at SpanBERT, which is used for NLP tasks like question answering. You'll also cover simpler and faster BERT variants based on knowledge distillation such as DistilBERT and TinyBERT. The book takes you through MBERT, XLM, and XLM-R in detail and then introduces you to sentence-BERT, which is used for obtaining sentence representation. Finally, you'll discover domain-specific BERT models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBERT, and discover an interesting variant called VideoBERT. By the end of this BERT book, you’ll be well-versed with using BERT and its variants for performing practical NLP tasks. What you will learnUnderstand the transformer model from the ground upFind out how BERT works and pre-train it using masked language model (MLM) and next sentence prediction (NSP) tasksGet hands-on with BERT by learning to generate contextual word and sentence embeddingsFine-tune BERT for downstream tasksGet to grips with ALBERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and SpanBERT modelsGet the hang of the BERT models based on knowledge distillationUnderstand cross-lingual models such as XLM and XLM-RExplore Sentence-BERT, VideoBERT, and BARTWho this book is for This book is for NLP professionals and data scientists looking to simplify NLP tasks to enable efficient language understanding using BERT. A basic understanding of NLP concepts and deep learning is required to get the best out of this book.




Representation Learning for Natural Language Processing


Book Description

This open access book provides an overview of the recent advances in representation learning theory, algorithms and applications for natural language processing (NLP). It is divided into three parts. Part I presents the representation learning techniques for multiple language entries, including words, phrases, sentences and documents. Part II then introduces the representation techniques for those objects that are closely related to NLP, including entity-based world knowledge, sememe-based linguistic knowledge, networks, and cross-modal entries. Lastly, Part III provides open resource tools for representation learning techniques, and discusses the remaining challenges and future research directions. The theories and algorithms of representation learning presented can also benefit other related domains such as machine learning, social network analysis, semantic Web, information retrieval, data mining and computational biology. This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, researchers, lecturers, and industrial engineers, as well as anyone interested in representation learning and natural language processing.




Preference Learning


Book Description

The topic of preferences is a new branch of machine learning and data mining, and it has attracted considerable attention in artificial intelligence research in previous years. It involves learning from observations that reveal information about the preferences of an individual or a class of individuals. Representing and processing knowledge in terms of preferences is appealing as it allows one to specify desires in a declarative way, to combine qualitative and quantitative modes of reasoning, and to deal with inconsistencies and exceptions in a flexible manner. And, generalizing beyond training data, models thus learned may be used for preference prediction. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and the treatment is comprehensive. The editors first offer a thorough introduction, including a systematic categorization according to learning task and learning technique, along with a unified notation. The first half of the book is organized into parts on label ranking, instance ranking, and object ranking; while the second half is organized into parts on applications of preference learning in multiattribute domains, information retrieval, and recommender systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning and data mining, and in fields such as multicriteria decision-making and operations research.