Title
Consistency and Variation in Kernel Neural Ranking Model.
Abstract
This paper studies the consistency of the kernel-based neural ranking model K-NRM, a recent state-of-the-art neural IR model, which is important for reproducible research and deployment in the industry. We find that K-NRM has low variance on relevance-based metrics across experimental trials. In spite of this low variance in overall performance, different trials produce different document rankings for individual queries. The main source of variance in our experiments was found to be different latent matching patterns captured by K-NRM. In the IR-customized word embeddings learned by K-NRM, the query-document word pairs follow two different matching patterns that are equally effective, but align word pairs differently in the embedding space. The different latent matching patterns enable a simple yet effective approach to construct ensemble rankers, which improve K-NRM's effectiveness and generalization abilities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3209978.3210107
SIGIR
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Neural-IR,Retrieval Model Stability,Ensemble-Rankers
Journal
abs/1809.10522
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
Mary Arpita Pyreddy et al. 2018. Consistency and Variation in Kernel Neural Ranking Model. In The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 961-964
978-1-4503-5657-2
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mary Arpita Pyreddy100.34
Varshini Ramaseshan200.34
Narendra Nath Joshi310.68
Zhuyun Dai417810.99
Chen-Yan Xiong540530.82
James P. Callan66237833.28
Zhiyuan Liu72037123.68