Self-taught Hashing For Fast Similarity Search

Zhang Dell, Wang Jun, Cai Deng, Lu Jinsong. Arxiv 2010

[Paper]    
ARXIV Supervised

The ability of fast similarity search at large scale is of great importance to many Information Retrieval (IR) applications. A promising way to accelerate similarity search is semantic hashing which designs compact binary codes for a large number of documents so that semantically similar documents are mapped to similar codes (within a short Hamming distance). Although some recently proposed techniques are able to generate high-quality codes for documents known in advance, obtaining the codes for previously unseen documents remains to be a very challenging problem. In this paper, we emphasise this issue and propose a novel Self-Taught Hashing (STH) approach to semantic hashing: we first find the optimal $l$-bit binary codes for all documents in the given corpus via unsupervised learning, and then train $l$ classifiers via supervised learning to predict the $l$-bit code for any query document unseen before. Our experiments on three real-world text datasets show that the proposed approach using binarised Laplacian Eigenmap (LapEig) and linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) outperforms state-of-the-art techniques significantly.

Similar Work

• Self-taught Hashing For Fast Similarity Search
• Semantic Hashing
• Efficient Document Retrieval By End-to-end Refining And Quantizing BERT Embedding With Contrastive Product Quantization
• Unsupervised Semantic Hashing With Pairwise Reconstruction