Marc Najork


2023

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DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents
Sanket Mehta | Jai Gupta | Yi Tay | Mostafa Dehghani | Vinh Tran | Jinfeng Rao | Marc Najork | Emma Strubell | Donald Metzler
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Differentiable Search Indices (DSIs) encode a corpus of documents in the parameters of a model and use the same model to map queries directly to relevant document identifiers. Despite the solid performance of DSI models, successfully deploying them in scenarios where document corpora change with time is an open problem. In this work, we introduce DSI++, a continual learning challenge for DSI with the goal of continuously indexing new documents while being able to answer queries related to both previously and newly indexed documents. Across different model scales and document identifier representations, we show that continual indexing of new documents leads to considerable forgetting of previously indexed documents. We also hypothesize and verify that the model experiences forgetting events during training, leading to unstable learning. To mitigate these issues, we investigate two approaches. The first focuses on modifying the training dynamics. Flatter minima implicitly alleviates forgetting, so we explicitly optimize for flatter loss basins and show that the model stably memorizes more documents (+12%). Next, we introduce a parametric memory to generate pseudo-queries for documents and supplement them during incremental indexing to prevent forgetting for the retrieval task. Extensive experiments on a novel continual indexing benchmark based on Natural Questions demonstrate that our proposed solution mitigates the forgetting in DSI++ by a significant margin and improves the average Hits@10 by +21.1% over competitive baselines.

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Creator Context for Tweet Recommendation
Spurthi Amba Hombaiah | Tao Chen | Mingyang Zhang | Michael Bendersky | Marc Najork | Matt Colen | Sergey Levi | Vladimir Ofitserov | Tanvir Amin
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

When discussing a tweet, people usually not only refer to the content it delivers, but also to the person behind the tweet. In other words, grounding the interpretation of the tweet in the context of its creator plays an important role in deciphering the true intent and the importance of the tweet. In this paper, we attempt to answer the question of how creator context should be used to advance tweet understanding. Specifically, we investigate the usefulness of different types of creator context, and examine different model structures for incorporating creator context in tweet modeling. We evaluate our tweet understanding models on a practical use case – recommending relevant tweets to news articles. This use case already exists in popular news apps, and can also serve as a useful assistive tool for journalists. We discover that creator context is essential for tweet understanding, and can improve application metrics by a large margin. However, we also observe that not all creator contexts are equal. Creator context can be time sensitive and noisy. Careful creator context selection and deliberate model structure design play an important role in creator context effectiveness.

2020

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DiPair: Fast and Accurate Distillation for Trillion-Scale Text Matching and Pair Modeling
Jiecao Chen | Liu Yang | Karthik Raman | Michael Bendersky | Jung-Jung Yeh | Yun Zhou | Marc Najork | Danyang Cai | Ehsan Emadzadeh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Pre-trained models like BERT ((Devlin et al., 2018) have dominated NLP / IR applications such as single sentence classification, text pair classification, and question answering. However, deploying these models in real systems is highly non-trivial due to their exorbitant computational costs. A common remedy to this is knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015), leading to faster inference. However – as we show here – existing works are not optimized for dealing with pairs (or tuples) of texts. Consequently, they are either not scalable or demonstrate subpar performance. In this work, we propose DiPair — a novel framework for distilling fast and accurate models on text pair tasks. Coupled with an end-to-end training strategy, DiPair is both highly scalable and offers improved quality-speed tradeoffs. Empirical studies conducted on both academic and real-world e-commerce benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach with speedups of over 350x and minimal quality drop relative to the cross-attention teacher BERT model.

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Representation Learning for Information Extraction from Form-like Documents
Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder | Navneet Potti | Sandeep Tata | James Bradley Wendt | Qi Zhao | Marc Najork
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose a novel approach using representation learning for tackling the problem of extracting structured information from form-like document images. We propose an extraction system that uses knowledge of the types of the target fields to generate extraction candidates and a neural network architecture that learns a dense representation of each candidate based on neighboring words in the document. These learned representations are not only useful in solving the extraction task for unseen document templates from two different domains but are also interpretable, as we show using loss cases.