In this paper, we focus on the problem of keyword and document matching by considering different relevance levels. In our recommendation system, different people follow different hot keywords with interest. We need to attach documents to each keyword and then distribute the documents to people who follow these keywords. The ideal documents should have the same topic with the keyword, which we call topic-aware relevance. In other words, topic-aware relevance documents are better than partially-relevance ones in this application. However, previous tasks never define topic-aware relevance clearly. To tackle this problem, we define a three-level relevance in keyword-document matching task: topic-aware relevance, partially-relevance and irrelevance. To capture the relevance between the short keyword and the document at above-mentioned three levels, we should not only combine the latent topic of the document with its deep neural representation, but also model complex interactions between the keyword and the document. To this end, we propose a Two-stage Interaction and Topic-Aware text matching model (TITA). In terms of “topic-aware”, we introduce neural topic model to analyze the topic of the document and then use it to further encode the document. In terms of “two-stage interaction”, we propose two successive stages to model complex interactions between the keyword and the document. Extensive experiments reveal that TITA outperforms other well-designed baselines and shows excellent performance in our recommendation system.

Recently, the retrieval models based on dense representations have been gradually applied in the first stage of the document retrieval tasks, showing better performance than traditional sparse vector space models. To obtain high efficiency, the basic structure of these models is Bi-encoder in most cases. However, this simple structure may cause serious information loss during the encoding of documents since the queries are agnostic. To address this problem, we design a method to mimic the queries to each of the documents by an iterative clustering process and represent the documents by multiple pseudo queries (i.e., the cluster centroids). To boost the retrieval process using approximate nearest neighbor search library, we also optimize the matching function with a two-step score calculation procedure. Experimental results on several popular ranking and QA datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art results while still remaining high efficiency.

In this paper, we propose a new ranking model DR-BERT, which improves the Document Retrieval (DR) task by a task-adaptive training process and a Segmented Token Recovery Mechanism (STRM). In the task-adaptive training, we first pre-train DR-BERT to be domain-adaptive and then make the two-phase fine-tuning. In the first-phase fine-tuning, the model learns query-document matching patterns regarding different query types in a pointwise way. Next, in the second-phase fine-tuning, the model learns document-level ranking features and ranks documents with regard to a given query in a listwise manner. Such pointwise plus listwise fine-tuning enables the model to minimize errors in the document ranking by incorporating ranking-specific supervisions. Meanwhile, the model derived from pointwise fine-tuning is also used to reduce noise in the training data of the listwise fine-tuning. On the other hand, we present STRM which can compute OOV word representation and contextualization more precisely in BERT-based models. As an effective strategy in DR-BERT, STRM improves the matching perfromance of OOV words between a query and a document. Notably, our DR-BERT model keeps in the top three on the MS MARCO leaderboard since May 20, 2020.

In this paper, we focus on the problem of question generation (QG). Recent neural network-based approaches employ the sequence-to-sequence model which takes an answer and its context as input and generates a relevant question as output. However, we observe two major issues with these approaches: (1) The generated interrogative words (or question words) do not match the answer type. (2) The model copies the context words that are far from and irrelevant to the answer, instead of the words that are close and relevant to the answer. To address these two issues, we propose an answer-focused and position-aware neural question generation model. (1) By answer-focused, we mean that we explicitly model question word generation by incorporating the answer embedding, which can help generate an interrogative word matching the answer type. (2) By position-aware, we mean that we model the relative distance between the context words and the answer. Hence the model can be aware of the position of the context words when copying them to generate a question. We conduct extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of our model. The experimental results show that our model significantly improves the baseline and outperforms the state-of-the-art system.