Why Does This Entity Matter? Support Passage Retrieval For Entity Retrieval

Shubham Chatterjee and Laura Dietz. 2019. Why Does This Entity Matter? Support Passage Retrieval For Entity Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2019).

Shield:

All data associated with this work is licensed and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Running the code

The code has been tested using Java openJDK 13. The code required Maven to be installed.

To install the code:

• Clone this repository using git clone.
• Inside the repository folder, run mvn clean install. This should create an executable Java JAR file called support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar inside the folder called target.

The JAR can be run from the command line with a variety of options, each of which creates a support passage run using one of the methods described in the paper.

Available Options

The following options are available when running the code.

• baseline1 : Produces the first baseline
• baseline2 : Produces the second baseline
• ecn : Produces a run using method "Entity Context Neighbors"
• pdrs : Produces a run using method "Retrieval Score of ECD"
• qee : Produces a run using method "Query Expansion using Entities"
• qew : Produces a run using method "Query Expansion using Words"
• sal-exp-1 : Produces a run using the first salience experiment. (See paper)
• sal-exp-2 : Produces a run using the second salience experiment. (See paper)

Each of the options above requires some command line arguments to work. Below, we describe the arguments required for each option.

Command Line Arguments

We use the following vaiables to describe the command line arguments:

• indexDir : Path to the Lucene index.
• supportPsgDir : Path to the support passage directory (where we store all the data, outputs, etc.)
• outputDir : Path to the directory (within the support passage directory) where we want to store our outputs.
• dataDir : Path to the directory (within the support passage directory) where we store all our data.
• paraRunFile : Name of the candidate passage run file within the data directory.
• entityRunFile : Name of the entity run file (provided) within the data directory.
• outFile : Name of the output run file. (This will be stored in the directory passed using the outputDir.)
• entityQrel : Path to the entity ground truth file.
• analyzer : Type of analyzer to use (eng for English and std for Standard). These refer to the Lucene analyzers.
• similarity : Type of similarity to use (bm25 for BM25, lmds for Language Model with Dirichlet Smoothing and lmjm for Language Model with Jelinek-Mercer Smoothing). These refer to the Lucene similarity. If choice is lmjm, you may have to specify an additional lamda value for the smoothing parameter.
• omit : Whether to omit query terms during query expansion (RM1) or not (RM3). Can be either yes or no.
• swatFile : Path to the serialized file containing the SWAT annotations. (Download from the online appendix).
• supportPsgRunFile : Path to the support passage run file
• takeKEntities : Number of entities to use for query expansion.
• takeKTerms : Number of terms to use for query expansion.
• takeKDocs : Number of documents to use as feedback set for query expansion.

Usage

• baseline1

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar baseline1 indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir paraRunFile entityRunFile outFile entityQrel 

• baseline2

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar baseline2 indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir entityRunFile entityQrel outFile analyzer similarity 

Note: If the choice for similarity is lmjm, this uses a default lamda value of 0.5.

• ecn

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar ecn indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir paraRunFile entityRunFile outFile entityQrel 

• pdrs

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar pdrs indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir paraRunFile entityRunFile outFile entityQrel 

• qee

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar qee indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir paraRunFile entityRunFile entityQrel takeKEntities omit analyzer similarity [lambda]

Note:

(1) If the choice for similarity is lmjm, then specify a lamda value.

(2) The name of the output file is generated automatically from within the code. The format is: qee_{similarity}_{rm1/rm3}

• qew

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar qew indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir paraRunFile entityRunFile entityQrel takeKTerms takeKDocs omit analyzer similarity [lambda]

Note:

(1) If the choice for similarity is lmjm, then specify a lamda value.

(2) The name of the output file is generated automatically from within the code. The format is: qew_{similarity}_{rm1/rm3}

• sal-exp-1

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar sal-exp-1 indexDir supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir paraRunFile entityRunFile outFile entityQrel swatFile

• sal-exp-2

java -jar target/support-passage-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar sal-exp-2 supportPsgDir outputDir dataDir supportPsgRunFile entityRunFile outFile swatFile

Reproducabilty

We used the following values in our experiments:

• lambda = 0.4
• takeKEntities = 20
• takeKTerms = 50
• takeKDocs = 100

Learning to rank using Ranklips

We perform our learning-to-rank experiments using the toolkit called Ranklips. Read about it here.

Cite

@inproceedings{10.1145/3341981.3344243,
   author = {Chatterjee, Shubham and Dietz, Laura},
   title = {Why Does This Entity Matter? Support Passage Retrieval for Entity Retrieval},
   year = {2019},
   isbn = {9781450368810},
   publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3341981.3344243},
   doi = {10.1145/3341981.3344243},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval},
   pages = {221–224},
   numpages = {4},
   keywords = {entity context document, entity context neighbors, entity salience, joint query-entity-passage features},
   location = {Santa Clara, CA, USA},
   series = {ICTIR '19}
}

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact Shubham Chatterjee at sc1242@wildcats.unh.edu or shubham.chatterjee94@gmail.com.