Geo-Encoder: A Chunk-Argument Bi-Encoder Framework for Chinese Geographic Re-Ranking

Yong Cao, Ruixue Ding, Boli Chen, Xianzhi Li, Min Chen, Daniel Hershcovich, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang

Main: Information Retrieval and Text Mining Oral Paper

Session 8: Information Retrieval and Text Mining (Oral)
Conference Room: Carlson
Conference Time: March 19, 16:00-17:30 (CET) (Europe/Malta)
TLDR:
You can open the #paper-218-Oral channel in a separate window.
Abstract: Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates, which is crucial for location-related services such as navigation maps. Unlike the general sentences, Chinese geographic contexts are closely intertwined with geographical concepts, from general spans (e.g., province) to specific spans (e.g., road). Given this feature, we propose an innovative framework, namely Geo-Encoder, to more effectively integrate Chinese geographical semantics into re-ranking pipelines. Our methodology begins by employing off-the-shelf tools to associate text with geographical spans, treating them as chunking units. Then, we present a multi-task learning module to simultaneously acquire an effective attention matrix that determines chunk contributions to geographic representations. Furthermore, we put forth an asynchronous update mechanism for the proposed task, aiming to guide the model to focus on specific chunks. Experiments on two Chinese benchmark datasets, show that the Geo-Encoder achieves significant improvements when compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, it leads to a substantial improvement in the Hit@1 score of MGEO-BERT, increasing it by 6.22% from 62.76 to 68.98 on the GeoTES dataset.