Month: January 2019

QRFA: A data-driven model of information-seeking dialogues by Svitlana Vakulenko, Kate Revoredo, Claudio Di Ciccio, and Maarten de Rijke is available online now at this location. Understanding the structure of interaction processes helps us to improve information-seeking dialogue systems. Analyzing an interaction process boils down to discovering patterns in sequences of alternating utterances exchanged between a…

Optimizing ranking models in an online setting by Harrie Oosterhuis and Maarten de Rijke is available online now at this location. Online Learning to Rank (OLTR) methods optimize ranking models by directly interacting with users, which allows them to be very efficient and responsive. All OLTR methods introduced during the past decade have extended on the…

When people change their mind: Off-policy evaluation in non-stationary recommendation environments by Rolf Jagerman, Ilya Markov, and Maarten de Rijke is online now at this location. We consider the novel problem of evaluating a recommendation policy offline in environments where the reward signal is non- stationary. Non-stationarity appears in many Information Retrieval (IR) applications such as…

Learning to transform, combine, and reason in open-domain question answering by Mostafa Dehghani, Hosein Azarbonyad, Jaap Kamps, and Maarten de Rijke is online now at this location. Users seek direct answers to complex questions from large open-domain knowledge sources like the Web. Open-domain question answering has become a critical task to be solved for building systems…