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The Bayesian approach to data analysis provides a powerful way to handle uncertainty in all observations, model parameters, and model structure using probability theory. Probabilistic programming languages make it easier to specify and fit…
The role of conversational assistants has become more prevalent in helping people increase their productivity. Document-centered assistance, for example to help an individual quickly review a document, has seen less significant progress,…
Natural language user interfaces to database systems have been studied for several decades now. They have mainly focused on parsing and interpreting natural language queries to generate them in a formal database language. We envision the…
Language models (LMs) are trained on collections of documents, written by individual human agents to achieve specific goals in an outside world. During training, LMs have access only to text of these documents, with no direct evidence of…
How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…
Cooperative database systems support a database user by searching for answers that are closely related to his query and hence are informative answers. Common operators to relax the user query are Dropping Condition, Anti-Instantiation and…
As conversational search becomes more pervasive, it becomes increasingly important to understand the user's underlying information needs when they converse with such systems in diverse domains. We conduct an in-situ study to understand…
There are increasingly applications of natural language processing techniques for information retrieval, indexing and topic modelling in the engineering contexts. A standard component of such tasks is the removal of stopwords, which are…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents that interact with users and with the world. To do so successfully, LLMs must construct representations of the world and form probabilistic beliefs about them. To provide…
This paper examines the use of Bayesian Networks to tackle one of the tougher problems in requirements engineering, translating user requirements into system requirements. The approach taken is to model domain knowledge as Bayesian Network…
This paper presents a method of optimization, based on both Bayesian Analysis technical and Galois Lattice of Fuzzy Semantic Network. The technical System we use learns by interpreting an unknown word using the links created between this…
Information access systems such as search engines and generative AI are central to how people seek, evaluate, and interpret information. Yet most systems are designed to optimise retrieval rather than to help users develop better search…
Generative AI models differ from traditional machine learning tools in that they allow users to provide as much or as little information as they choose in their inputs. This flexibility often leads users to omit certain details, relying on…
Recent research has shown that mixed-initiative conversational search, based on the interaction between users and computers to clarify and improve a query, provides enormous advantages. Nonetheless, incorporating additional information…
In this report, we unify two quite distinct approaches to information retrieval: region models and language models. Region models were developed for structured document retrieval. They provide a well-defined behaviour as well as a simple…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
Tackling the information retrieval gap between non-technical database end-users and those with the knowledge of formal query languages has been an interesting area of data management and analytics research. The use of natural language…
People naturally bring their prior beliefs to bear on how they interpret the new information, yet few formal models exist for accounting for the influence of users' prior beliefs in interactions with data presentations like visualizations.…
There exists a wide set of techniques to perform keyword-based search over relational databases but all of them match the keywords in the users' queries to elements of the databases to be queried as first step. The matching process is a…
Natural language programming is a promising approach to enable end users to instruct new tasks for intelligent agents. However, our formative study found that end users would often use unclear, ambiguous or vague concepts when naturally…