[Xapian-devel] [GSoC2012] Learning to Rank: few thoughts/issues

Mon Apr 2 17:33:41 BST 2012

Thanks Parth for your inputs. I had gone through the 134 or so feature list
at MSR's LETOR site for the ranking algorithms. The traditional IR features
I was talking about in my previous mail were referring to those ones.

Thanks for the heads-up on the unsupervised features part. I will be more
inclined on using one of the recently famous *deep learning
architectures*for unsupervised feature extraction simply because they
have been shown to
outperform hand-crafted feature based state-of-the-art algorithms. PFA a
snapshot<Deep Learning.png> from one of the tutorials by Andrew Ng
highlighting the same fact.

I would like to discuss about the probable methodology regarding the same.

*Methodology:*
In order to do unsupervised feature extraction from the documents, I'll use
Denoising Stacked Autoencoders. Its a 2 stage process:

   - Unsupervised pre-training
   - Supervised fine tuning

*Unsupervised pre-training:*

The denoising autoencoders[link<http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/Autoencoders_and_Sparsity>]
can be stacked to form a deep network by feeding the latent representation
(output code) of the denoising auto-encoder found on the layer below as
input to the current layer. The *unsupervised pre-training* of such an
architecture is done one layer at a time. Each layer is trained as a
denoising auto-encoder by minimizing the reconstruction of its input (which
is the output code of the previous layer). Once the first *n* layers are
trained, we can train the *n+1-th* layer because we can now compute the
code or latent representation from the layer below.
The kind of representation learnt by this step is a rich representation
which has shown to be better than hand-crafted features/representations.

*Supervised fine tuning:*

Once all layers are pre-trained, the network goes through a second stage of
training called fine-tuning. Generally we consider supervised fine-tuning
where we want to minimize prediction error on a supervised task.
*For our problem statement(ranking):* we would use the features generated
in the unsupervised pre-training stage and add the previously used IR
features(a subset of the 136 LETOR features) and feed this to ListMLE or
other Learning to Rank algorithm.

To sum up, we would perform unsupervised pre-training to get features for
all the documents(unlabeled as well as labeled) and then proceed to do
supervised fine tuning only on the labeled data/documents. This way we
would use both labelled and unlabeled data to learn features to represent
documents. I have worked a bit on a related project, so the integration of
such a combination (Unsupervised feature extraction+ListMLE) into xapian
shouldn't be a tough asking(hopefully) as a GSoC project.

Your inputs are welcome. Thanks for your time.

-
Rishabh.

PS: A lot of hot-research is going on in the Deep Learning field. Here's a
link <http://deeplearningworkshopnips2011.wordpress.com/> to a
NIPS'11(Tier-1 in ML) workshop on the same for everyone's reference.

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 3:52 PM, Parth Gupta <parthg.88 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Rishabh,
>
> Good to hear from you. Its never late to jump-in for GSoC.
>
>  *Doubt1:*
>>
>> *Feature Extraction/Selection:*
>> The various datasets listed on MSR's LETOR have a limited set of
>> features. Current implementation in xapian's LETOR has 5
>> features[tf,idf,doc_len,coll_tf,coll_len]. While algorithms for learning
>> ranking models have been intensively studied, this is not the case for
>> feature selection, despite of its importance. In a paper presented at
>> SIGIR'07 [Tier1 in IR domain], the authors have highlighted the
>> effectiveness of feature selection methods for ranking tasks.[link<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/tyliu/fsr.pdf>]
>> I believe that apart from the traditional/cliched IR features, we should*incorporate new features
>> * to improve the performance of the LETOR module.
>>
>>
> There is no point denying the fact that there is a need for more features.
> If you have noticed on the GSoC idea page of Letor, it says "The project
> can also include some work on the features, like adding support for more
> features, selecting a subset of features, etc." Now the point comes, which
> features you want to incorporate. The Letor datasets are growing enormously
> in terms of number of features [Letor MSR 46 ->136 , Yahoo Dataset 700]. It
> would make sense to incorporate those features which can be tracked and
> suits the environment. More over majority of the features dwell around the
> IR measures like bm25, TF, IDF, LM and different combination of them for
> different part of the document. Some of the other features of Letor
> Datasets are number of outgoing links, number of incoming links, page rank,
> number of children [1,2]. These features are valid and available only in
> the linked data and moreover, straight forward to compute. Yahoo dataset
> does not even declare the features because of the proprietary issues. But I
> think it also includes some features like the age of the page, number of
> clicks on it, total time spent, and so on.
>
> [1]
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/beijing/projects/letor/LETOR4.0/Data/Features_in_LETOR4.pdf
> [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mslr/feature.aspx
>
>>
>> *Using unlabeled data:*
>> Over the last 3-4 years a lot of papers have identified the importance of
>> using unlabeled data to assist the task at hand by using it during feature
>> extraction stage. Andrew Ng proposed a Self-Taught learning
>> framework[ICML'07 paper<http://ai.stanford.edu/%7Ehllee/icml07-selftaughtlearning.pdf>]
>> wherein they make use of unlabeled data to improve performance. A very
>> recent paper at ICML'11<http://eprints.pascal-network.org/archive/00008597/01/342_icmlpaper.pdf>used the advantage of feature learning using unlabeled data and beat the
>> state-of-the-art in sentiment classification.
>>
>> Combining the above two points, I suggest an approach which uses features
>> learnt from data in an unsupervised fashion "*in addition to*" the
>> commonly used features.
>> *Please note:* all this is in addition to the traditional features and
>> finally we would be using *listwise/pairwise approaches*[ListMLE, et
>> cetera] to train our models on the new set of features. Please let me know
>> if this sounds good.
>>
>>
> This phenomenon, Semi-supervised ranking, is indeed interesting. If you
> want to incorporate it, feel free to discuss the plan.
>
>
>> *Doubt2:*
>>
>> *Rank Aggregation:*
>> Now that Xappian will have >1 Learning to rank algorithms, we should look
>> into some kind of rank aggregation as well: combining outputs by various
>> algorithms to get a final rank ordering for results. I went though a
>> ECML'07 paper on unsupervised method for the same[link<http://l2r.cs.uiuc.edu/%7Edanr/Papers/KlementievRoSm07.pdf>].
>> I haven't yet completely understood their approach but will do so by the
>> end of day.
>>
>>
> Rank Aggregation, is another LTR approach with a set of ranked lists at
> hand for the query. At the moment Xapian can have 2 ranked list, BM25 and
> SVM based LTR scheme. I think these techniques will produce better results
> with the input of more number of ranked list than Xapian can offer at the
> moment. But it would be interesting to explore after some more ranking
> schemes incorporation.
>
>
>>
>> *Modularity:*
>> Developing such modules in a modular fashion such that its not necessary
>> to use all of them all the times, would be good. Whenever the user feels
>> that in addition to basic features, he/she could use additional features,
>> the feature extraction module could be plugged in. Same for rank
>> aggregation.
>>
>
> Agreed and that in fact, that will be the goal.
>
> Best,
> Parth.
>
>
>> *Relevant Background:*
>> I have worked on few research oriented projects in Machine Learning, but
>> most of them involved coding in Matlab/Java. More details about me: [link<http://www.rishabhmehrotra.com/index.htm>
>> ].
>> I have been working on a project on Topic Modeling(using Latent Dirichlet
>> Allocation) for Tweets. Link <http://code.google.com/p/tweettrends/> of
>> the code on Google code. Also, I am involved in a collage project on
>> building *focused crawler *& extending it to something like NELL<http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/><far-fetched
>> dream as of now :) >.[Google code link<http://code.google.com/p/bits-crawler/source/browse/>
>> ]
>>
>> Please let me know how you feel about the above mentioned points [and/or
>> if I am way off the track].
>>
>> Best,
>> Rishabh.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Xapian-devel mailing list
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>> http://lists.xapian.org/mailman/listinfo/xapian-devel
>>
>>
>

-- 
Rishabh.
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