Ronan Cummins

Ronan Cummins, Marek Rei

Grammatical error detection and automated essay scoring are two tasks in the area of automated assessment. Traditionally these tasks have been treated independently with different machine learning models and features used for each task. In this paper, we develop a multi-task neural network model that jointly optimises for both tasks, and in particular we show that neural automated essay scoring can be significantly improved. We show that while the essay score provides little evidence to inform grammatical error detection, the essay score is highly influenced by error detection.

Ronan Cummins

We introduce a generalised multivariate Polya process for document language modelling. The framework outlined here generalises a number of statistical language models used in information retrieval for modelling document generation. In particular, we show that the choice of replacement matrix M ultimately defines the type of random process and therefore defines a particular type of document language model. We show that a particular variant of the general model is useful for modelling term-specific burstiness. Furthermore, via experimentation we show that this variant significantly improves retrieval effectiveness over a strong baseline on a number of small test collections.

Marek Rei, Ronan Cummins

We investigate the task of assessing sentence-level prompt relevance in learner essays. Various systems using word overlap, neural embeddings and neural compositional models are evaluated on two datasets of learner writing. We propose a new method for sentence-level similarity calculation, which learns to adjust the weights of pre-trained word embeddings for a specific task, achieving substantially higher accuracy compared to other relevant baselines.

Ronan Cummins

Query-expansion via pseudo-relevance feedback is a popular method of overcoming the problem of vocabulary mismatch and of increasing average retrieval effectiveness. In this paper, we develop a new method that estimates a query topic model from a set of pseudo-relevant documents using a new language modelling framework. We assume that documents are generated via a mixture of multivariate Polya distributions, and we show that by identifying the topical terms in each document, we can appropriately select terms that are likely to belong to the query topic model. The results of experiments on several TREC collections show that the new approach compares favourably to current state-of-the-art expansion methods.

Ronan Cummins, Jiaul Hoque Paik, Yuanhua Lv

The multinomial language model has been one of the most effective models of retrieval for over a decade. However, the multinomial distribution does not model one important linguistic phenomenon relating to term-dependency, that is the tendency of a term to repeat itself within a document (i.e. word burstiness). In this article, we model document generation as a random process with reinforcement (a multivariate Polya process) and develop a Dirichlet compound multinomial language model that captures word burstiness directly. We show that the new reinforced language model can be computed as efficiently as current retrieval models, and with experiments on an extensive set of TREC collections, we show that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art language model for a number of standard effectiveness metrics. Experiments also show that the tuning parameter in the proposed model is more robust than in the multinomial language model. Furthermore, we develop a constraint for the verbosity hypothesis and show that the proposed model adheres to the constraint. Finally, we show that the new language model essentially introduces a measure closely related to idf which gives theoretical justification for combining the term and document event spaces in tf-idf type schemes.