Related papers: Improving Query Safety at Pinterest
Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with "word salad" text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more…
Recommendation systems aim to identify items that are likely to be of interest to users. In many cases, users are interested in package recommendations as collections of items. For example, a dietitian may wish to derive a dietary plan as a…
Despite detection of suicidal ideation on social media has made great progress in recent years, people's implicitly and anti-real contrarily expressed posts still remain as an obstacle, constraining the detectors to acquire higher…
Poor information retrieval performance has often been attributed to the query-document vocabulary mismatch problem which is defined as the difficulty for human users to formulate precise natural language queries that are in line with the…
While recent image generation models demonstrate a remarkable ability to handle a wide variety of image generation tasks, this flexibility makes them hard to control via prompting or simple inference adaptation alone, rendering them…
Effective query expansion for web search benefits from promoting both exploration and result diversity to capture multiple interpretations and facets of a query. While recent LLM-based methods have improved retrieval performance and…
With the rapid growth of internet technologies, Web has become a huge repository of information and keeps growing exponentially under no editorial control. However the human capability to read, access and understand Web content remains…
Due to the rapid development of science and technology, the importance of imprecise, noisy, and uncertain data is increasing at an exponential rate. Thus, mining patterns in uncertain databases have drawn the attention of researchers.…
BERT-style models pre-trained on the general corpus (e.g., Wikipedia) and fine-tuned on specific task corpus, have recently emerged as breakthrough techniques in many NLP tasks: question answering, text classification, sequence labeling and…
Suicide is a prominent issue in society. Unfortunately, many people at risk for suicide do not receive the support required. Barriers to people receiving support include social stigma and lack of access to mental health care. With the…
We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and…
When users work with AI agents, they form conscious or subconscious expectations of them. Meeting user expectations is crucial for such agents to engage in successful interactions and teaming. However, users may form expectations of an…
In search engines, query expansion (QE) is a crucial technique to improve search experience. Previous studies often rely on long-term search log mining, which leads to slow updates and is sub-optimal for time-sensitive news searches. In…
Entity set expansion, aiming at expanding a small seed entity set with new entities belonging to the same semantic class, is a critical task that benefits many downstream NLP and IR applications, such as question answering, query…
We study how to utilize (possibly machine-learned) predictions in a model for computing under uncertainty in which an algorithm can query unknown data. The goal is to minimize the number of queries needed to solve the problem. We consider…
Pinterest is an image-based online social network, which was launched in the year 2010 and has gained a lot of traction, ever since. Within 3 years, Pinterest has attained 48.7 million unique users. This stupendous growth makes it…
Selectivity estimation of a boolean query based on frequent itemsets can be solved by describing the problem by a linear program. However, the number of variables in the equations is exponential, rendering the approach tractable only for…
Discussion threads form a central part of the experience on many Web sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Google Plus and knowledge creation sites such as Wikipedia. To help users manage the challenge of allocating…
The complexity of navigating digital privacy, safety, and security threats often falls directly on users. This leads to users seeking help from family and peers, platforms and advice guides, dedicated communities, and even large language…
Spellchecking is one of the most fundamental and widely used search features. Correcting incorrectly spelled user queries not only enhances the user experience but is expected by the user. However, most widely available spellchecking…