Related papers: Approximate Recall Confidence Intervals
Legal consultation is inherently iterative: before giving advice, a system must identify relevant legal elements, gather missing facts and authorities, and determine whether the current evidence is sufficient. Existing retrieval-augmented…
Random-effects meta-analyses have been widely applied in evidence synthesis for various types of medical studies. However, standard inference methods (e.g. restricted maximum likelihood estimation) usually underestimate statistical errors…
Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval research. For decades, lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but it also has inherent defects, such as the vocabulary mismatch problem.…
This paper develops a methodology for approximating the posterior first two moments of the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. Partially specified probability models, which are defined only by specifying means and variances, are…
Motivated by the promising performance of pre-trained language models, we investigate BERT in an evidence retrieval and claim verification pipeline for the FEVER fact extraction and verification challenge. To this end, we propose to use two…
There are different citation habits in the research fields that influence the obsolescence of the research literature. We analyze the distinctive obsolescence of research literature in disciplinary journals in eight scientific subfields…
Monte Carlo methods are used to approximate the means, $\mu$, of random variables $Y$, whose distributions are not known explicitly. The key idea is that the average of a random sample, $Y_1, ..., Y_n$, tends to $\mu$ as $n$ tends to…
Solutions to inverse problems that are ill-conditioned or ill-posed may have significant intrinsic uncertainty. Unfortunately, analysing and quantifying this uncertainty is very challenging, particularly in high-dimensional problems. As a…
Complex information needs may involve set-compositional queries using conjunction, disjunction, and exclusion, yet it remains unclear whether current retrieval paradigms genuinely satisfy such constraints or exploit `semantic shortcuts'. We…
This article is concerned with Monte-Carlo methods for the estimation of the trace of an implicitly given matrix $A$ whose information is only available through matrix-vector products. Such a method approximates the trace by an average of…
[Abridged] - Spectral Retrieval is a plug-in re-ranking stage that interpolates between per-token MaxSim and mean-pool retrieval through a multi-scale sinc convolution over token embeddings. In standard dense retrieval each document is one…
Language models (LMs) should provide reliable confidence estimates to help users detect mistakes in their outputs and defer to human experts when necessary. Asking a language model to assess its confidence ("Score your confidence from…
In the recent paper [5], a Bayesian approach for constructing confidence intervals in monotone regression problems is proposed, based on credible intervals. We view this method from a frequentist point of view, and show that it corresponds…
Typically, every part in most coherent text has some plausible reason for its presence, some function that it performs to the overall semantics of the text. Rhetorical relations, e.g. contrast, cause, explanation, describe how the parts of…
The proposed approach extends the confidence posterior distribution to the semi-parametric empirical Bayes setting. Whereas the Bayesian posterior is defined in terms of a prior distribution conditional on the observed data, the confidence…
The Relevance Feedback (RF) process relies on accurate and real-time relevance estimation of feedback documents to improve retrieval performance. Since collecting explicit relevance annotations imposes an extra burden on the user, extensive…
Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) hold promise to produce language understanding systems that are are factual, efficient, and up-to-date. An important desideratum of RALMs, is that retrieved information helps model performance…
Sequential Bayesian inference can be used for continual learning to prevent catastrophic forgetting of past tasks and provide an informative prior when learning new tasks. We revisit sequential Bayesian inference and test whether having…
This paper reports on an effort of reproducing the organizers' baseline as well as the top performing participant submission at the 2021 edition of the TREC Conversational Assistance track. TREC systems are commonly regarded as reference…
It is a common contention that it is an ``impossible mission'' to exactly determine the minimum sample size for the estimation of a binomial parameter with prescribed margin of error and confidence level. In this paper, we investigate such…