Bo Long

Deep learning has become the dominant approach in addressing various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there is a rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, there is a surge of interest in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large number of NLP tasks. In this monograph, the authors present a comprehensive overview on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. They propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, which systematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction, graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. They further introduce a large number of NLP applications that exploits the power of GNNs and summarize the corresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, they discuss various outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future research directions. This is the first comprehensive overview of Graph Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing. It provides students and researchers with a concise and accessible resource to quickly get up to speed with an important area of machine learning research.

In plain, uncomplicated language, and using detailed examples to explain the key concepts, models, and algorithms in vertical search ranking, Relevance Ranking for Vertical Search Engines teaches readers how to manipulate ranking algorithms to achieve better results in real-world applications. This reference book for professionals covers concepts and theories from the fundamental to the advanced, such as relevance, query intention, location-based relevance ranking, and cross-property ranking. It covers the most recent developments in vertical search ranking applications, such as freshness-based relevance theory for new search applications, location-based relevance theory for local search applications, and cross-property ranking theory for applications involving multiple verticals.