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Poster
Learning to Navigate Wikipedia by Taking Random Walks
Manzil Zaheer · Kenneth Marino · Will Grathwohl · John Schultz · Wendy Shang · Sheila Babayan · Arun Ahuja · Ishita Dasgupta · Christine Kaeser-Chen · Rob Fergus

Wed Nov 30 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Hall J #108
in Poster Session 3 »

A fundamental ability of an intelligent web-based agent is seeking out and acquiring new information. Internet search engines reliably find the correct vicinity but the top results may be a few links away from the desired target. A complementary approach is navigation via hyperlinks, employing a policy that comprehends local content and selects a link that moves it closer to the target. In this paper, we show that behavioral cloning of randomly sampled trajectories is sufficient to learn an effective link selection policy. We demonstrate the approach on a graph version of Wikipedia with 38M nodes and 387M edges. The model is able to efficiently navigate between nodes 5 and 20 steps apart 96% and 92% of the time, respectively. We then use the resulting embeddings and policy in downstream fact verification and question answering tasks where, in combination with basic TF-IDF search and ranking methods, they are competitive results to the state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords: question answering · fact verification · web navigation · wikipedia · retrieval
[ Paper]  [ Poster]  [ OpenReview] 

Author Information

Manzil Zaheer (Google)
Kenneth Marino (Carnegie Mellon University)
Will Grathwohl (Deepmind)
John Schultz (DeepMind)
Wendy Shang (University of Amsterdam)
Sheila Babayan (DeepMind)
Arun Ahuja (DeepMind)
Ishita Dasgupta (DeepMind)
Christine Kaeser-Chen (Google Inc.)
Rob Fergus (DeepMind / NYU)

Rob Fergus is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He received a Masters in Electrical Engineering with Prof. Pietro Perona at Caltech, before completing a PhD with Prof. Andrew Zisserman at the University of Oxford in 2005. Before coming to NYU, he spent two years as a post-doc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, working with Prof. William Freeman. He has received several awards including a CVPR best paper prize, a Sloan Fellowship & NSF Career award and the IEEE Longuet-Higgins prize.

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