Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a transformative paradigm in search and recommender systems, leveraging numeric-based identifier representations to enhance efficiency and generalization. Notably, methods like TIGER, which employ Residual Quantization-based Semantic Identifiers (RQ-SID), have shown significant promise in e-commerce scenarios by effectively managing item IDs. However, a critical issue termed the "Hourglass" phenomenon, occurs in RQ-SID, where intermediate codebook tokens become overly concentrated, hindering the full utilization of generative retrieval methods. This paper analyses and addresses this problem by identifying data sparsity and long-tailed distribution as the primary causes. Through comprehensive experiments and detailed ablation studies, we analyze the impact of these factors on codebook utilization and data distribution. Our findings reveal that the “Hourglass” phenomenon substantially impacts the performance of RQ-SID in generative retrieval. We propose effective solutions to mitigate this issue, thereby significantly enhancing the effectiveness of generative retrieval in real-world E-commerce applications.

Deep semantic retrieval has achieved remarkable success in online E-commerce applications. The majority of methods aim to distinguish positive items and negative items for each query by utilizing margin loss or softmax loss. Despite their decent performance, these methods are highly sensitive to hyper-parameters, i.e., margin and temperature 𝜏, which measure the similarity of negative pairs and affect the distribution of items in metric space. How to design and choose adaptively parameters for different pairs is still an open challenge. Recently several methods have attempted to alleviate the above problem by learning each parameter through trainable/statistical methods in the recommendation. We argue that those are not suitable for retrieval scenarios, due to the agnosticism and diversity of the queries. To fully overcome this limitation, we propose a novel adaptive metric learning method that designs a simple and universal hyper-parameter-free learning method to improve the performance of retrieval. Specifically, we first propose a method that adaptive obtains the hyper-parameters by relying on the batch similarity without fixed or extra-trainable hyper-parameters. Subsequently, we adopt a symmetric metric learning method to mitigate model collapse issues. Furthermore, the proposed method is general and sheds a highlight on other fields. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method significantly outperforms previous methods on a real-world dataset, highlighting the superiority and effectiveness of our method. This method has been successfully deployed on an online E-commerce search platform and brought substantial economic benefits.

This article presents the latest dissemination activities and technical developments that were carried out for the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) service. It also recalls the main principle and submission process for providers to obtain their 13-digit ISLRN identifier. Up to March 2016, 2100 Language Resources were allocated an ISLRN number, not only ELRA’s and LDC’s catalogued Language Resources, but also the ones from other important organisations like the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Resource Management Agency (RMA) who expressed their strong support to this initiative. In the research field, not only assigning a unique identification number is important, but also referring to a Language Resource as an object per se (like publications) has now become an obvious requirement. The ISLRN could also become an important parameter to be considered to compute a Language Resource Impact Factor (LRIF) in order to recognize the merits of the producers of Language Resources. Integrating the ISLRN number into a LR-oriented bibliographical reference is thus part of the objective. The idea is to make use of a BibTeX entry that would take into account Language Resources items, including ISLRN.The ISLRN being a requested field within the LREC 2016 submission, we expect that several other LRs will be allocated an ISLRN number by the conference date. With this expansion, this number aims to be a spreadly-used LR citation instrument within works referring to LRs.

In this paper we describe the new developments brought to LRE Map, especially in terms of the user interface of the Web application, of the searching of the information therein, and of the data model updates.

To allow an easy understanding of the various licenses that exist for the use of Language Resources (ELRA’s, META-SHARE’s, Creative Commons’, etc.), ELRA has developed a License Wizardto help the right-holders share/distribute their resources under the appropriate license. It also aims to be exploited by users to better understand the legal obligations that apply in various licensing situations. The present paper elaborates on the License Wizard functionalities of this web configurator, which enables to select a number of legal features and obtain the user license adapted to the users selection, to define which user licenses they would like to select in order to distribute their Language Resources, to integrate the user license terms into a Distribution Agreement that could be proposed to ELRA or META-SHARE for further distribution through the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources. Thanks to a flexible back office, the structure of the legal feature selection can easily be reviewed to include other features that may be relevant for other licenses. Integrating contributions from other initiatives thus aim to be one of the obvious next steps, with a special focus on CLARIN and Linked Data experiences.