No abstract

Users often formulate their search queries and questions with immature language without well-developed keywords and complete structures. Such queries are likely to fail to express their true information needs and raise ambiguity as fragmental language often yield various interpretations and aspects. This gives search engines a hard time processing and understanding the query, and eventually leads to unsatisfactory retrieval results. An alternative approach to direct answer while facing an ambiguous query is to proactively ask clarifying questions to the user. Recent years have seen many works and shared tasks from both NLP and IR community about identifying the need for asking clarifying question and methodology to generate them. An often neglected fact by these works is that although sometimes the need for clarifying questions is correctly recognized, the clarifying questions these system generate are still off-topic and dissatisfaction provoking to users and may just cause users to leave the conversation.In this work, we propose a risk-aware conversational search agent model to balance the risk of answering user's query and asking clarifying questions. The agent is fully aware that asking clarifying questions can potentially collect more information from user, but it will compare all the choices it has and evaluate the risks. Only after then, it will make decision between answering or asking. To demonstrate that our system is able to retrieve better answers, we conduct experiments on the MSDialog dataset which contains real-world customer service conversations from Microsoft products community. We also purpose a reinforcement learning strategy which allows us to train our model on the original dataset directly and saves us from any further data annotation efforts. Our experiment results show that our risk-aware conversational search agent is able to significantly outperform strong non-risk-aware baselines.

Local linear embedding is a kind of very competitive nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique with good representational capacity for a broader range of manifolds and high computational efficiency. However, it is based on the assumption that the whole data manifolds are evenly distributed so that it determines the neighborhood for all points with the same neighborhood size. Accordingly, it fails to nicely deal with most real problems that are unevenly distributed. This paper presents a new approach that takes the general conceptual framework of Hessian locally linear embedding so as to guarantee its correctness in the setting of local isometry for an open connected subset, but dynamically determines the local neighborhood size for each point. This approach estimates the approximate geodesic distance between any two points by the shortest path in the local neighborhood graph, and then determines the neighborhood size for each point by using the relationship between its local estimated geodesic distance matrix and local Euclidean distance matrix. This approach has clear geometry intuition as well as the better performance and stability. It deals with the sparsely sampled or noise contaminated data sets that are often unevenly distributed. The conducted experiments on benchmark data sets validate the proposed approach.

In conversational search, agents can interact with users by asking clarifying questions to increase their chance to find better results. Many recent works and shared tasks in both NLP and IR communities have focused on identifying the need of asking clarifying questions and methodologies of generating them. These works assume asking a clarifying question is a safe alternative to retrieving results. As existing conversational search models are far from perfect, it’s possible and common that they could retrieve/generate bad clarifying questions. Asking too many clarifying questions can also drain user’s patience when the user prefers searching efficiency over correctness. Hence, these models can get backfired and harm users’ search experience because of these risks by asking clarifying questions.  In this work, we propose a simulation framework to simulate the risk of asking questions in conversational search and further revise a risk-aware conversational search model to control the risk. We show the model’s robustness and effectiveness through extensive experiments on three conversational datasets, including MSDialog, Ubuntu Dialog Corpus, and Opendialkg in which we compare it with multiple baselines. We show that the risk-control module can work with two different re-ranker models and outperform all the baselines in most of our experiments.

In this paper, we conduct research on image orientation bridge structural stability testing platform based on feature point recognition and the genetic algorithm. The pseudo-dynamic test in structural seismic test requires a step-by-step solution to the differential equation of motion of the whole structure. In each solution step, the calculated displacement is applied to the specimen, and then the measured feedback force is put into the differential equation. One-step displacement, and so on. As the number and capacity of a single laboratory equipment and test site is limited, often only one substructure tests. To deal with this challenge, this paper proposes the feature point recognition and the genetic algorithm based methodology to construct the image orientation bridge structural stability testing platform. The theoretical basis and numerical performance are proved.