FADERIC - LongEval CLEF 2023 Lab, Task 1. LongEval-Retrieval

Project of group FADERIC for the "Search Engines" course, A.Y. 2022/2023. The group is participating in the LongEval Lab at CLEF 2023, Task 1 - LongEval-Retrieval. The task aims at evaluating the temporal persistence of information retrieval (IR) systems and text classifiers.

"Search Engines" is a course for the master's degree in "Computer Engineering" and master's degree in "Data Science" at the University of Padua, Italy.

This is a copy of the original repository on BitBucket.

Features

• Analyzer, custom analyzers for English and French documents. Both use tokenizing, stopwords removal and stemming
• Searcher
  • word N-grams
  • fuzzyness
  • synonyms with fixed synonyms dictionary or OpenNLP POS tagging (English only)
• Reranker, document reranking with pytorch and pygaggle. Three models have been tested:
  • BERT-based model trained on MS MARCO dataset
  • Mono-T5
  • custom trained model based on BERT

Organisation of the repository

The repository is organised as follows:

• code: this folder contains the source code of the developed system.
• runs: this folder contains the runs produced by the developed system, in particular:
  • in the main folder you can find the runs submitted to CLEF;
  • in the runs-fixed folder you can find the runs that we have fixed after submission because there where some problems in the run execution;
  • in the runs-train-not-submitted you can find the runs performed on the training collection that have been used to evaluate the progress of our system during its development.
• results: this folder contains the performance scores of the runs.
• homework-1: this folder contains the report describing the techniques applied and insights gained.
• homework-2: this folder contains the final paper submitted to CLEF.
• slides: this folder contains the slides used for presenting the conducted project.

Instructions

To reproduce the runs you can set the preferred properties in the configuration file code/src/main/resources/config.xml.

To use the reranking feature you have to follow these instructions:

• Install Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 (or greater), you can get it with Microsoft C++ Build Tools at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/
• Install Python v3.7.9
• Add the installation directory to the PATH environment variable, it has to be the first Python directory to appear in the list otherwise the other one will be chosen
• Set the PYTHONHOME environment variable to the installation directory
• Install the following packages in Python v3.7.9:
  • jep v4.1.1
  • pygaggle v0.0.3.1
  • torch v1.5.0, please follow the right install options for your machine available at https://pytorch.org/get-started/previous-versions/#wheel-17

Results

Our system achived the best overall performance of all submitted systems, as can be seen in the overview paper of the LongEval task.

Full results and description of the system can be found in the published paper.

License

All the contents of this repository are shared using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Contributors

• Enrico Bolzonello - 2087644
• Christian Marchiori - 2078343
• Daniele Moschetta - 2087640
• Riccardo Trevisiol - 2095666
• Fabio Zanini - 2088628