Related papers: Question Answering Against Very-Large Text Collect…
Open book question answering is a type of natural language based QA (NLQA) where questions are expected to be answered with respect to a given set of open book facts, and common knowledge about a topic. Recently a challenge involving such…
Re-finding files from a personal computer is a frequent demand to users. When encountered a difficult re-finding task, people may not recall the attributes used by conventional re-finding methods, such as a file's path, file name, keywords…
Large Language Model (LLM)-based applications are graduating from research prototypes to products serving millions of users, influencing how people write and consume information. A prominent example is the appearance of Answer Engines:…
Emergence of various vertical search engines highlights the fact that a single ranking technology cannot deal with the complexity and scale of search problems. For example, technology behind video and image search is very different from…
Automatic question generation (AQG) has broad applicability in domains such as tutoring systems, conversational agents, healthcare literacy, and information retrieval. Existing efforts at AQG have been limited to short answer lengths of up…
Question Answering System (QAS) is used for information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP) to reduce human effort. There are numerous QAS based on the user documents present today, but they all are limited to providing…
In this paper we describe ExtrAns, an answer extraction system. Answer extraction (AE) aims at retrieving those exact passages of a document that directly answer a given user question. AE is more ambitious than information retrieval and…
A challenging case in web search and question answering are count queries, such as \textit{"number of songs by John Lennon"}. Prior methods merely answer these with a single, and sometimes puzzling number or return a ranked list of text…
Question answering systems are recognized as popular and frequently effective means of information seeking on the web. In such systems, information seekers can receive a concise response to their query by presenting their questions in…
Most, if not all forms of ellipsis (e.g., so does Mary) are similar to reading comprehension questions (what does Mary do), in that in order to resolve them, we need to identify an appropriate text span in the preceding discourse. Following…
Existing knowledge-based question answering systems often rely on small annotated training data. While shallow methods like relation extraction are robust to data scarcity, they are less expressive than the deep meaning representation…
We introduce the novel task of answering entity-seeking recommendation questions using a collection of reviews that describe candidate answer entities. We harvest a QA dataset that contains 47,124 paragraph-sized real user questions from…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
Inquiry is fundamental to communication, and machines cannot effectively collaborate with humans unless they can ask questions. In this work, we build a neural network model for the task of ranking clarification questions. Our model is…
Visual question answering is the task of returning the answer to a question about an image. A challenge is that different people often provide different answers to the same visual question. To our knowledge, this is the first work that aims…
Users often make ambiguous requests that require clarification. We study the problem of asking clarification questions in an information retrieval setting, where systems often face ambiguous search queries and it is challenging to turn the…
Tables are a powerful and popular tool for organizing and manipulating data. A vast number of tables can be found on the Web, which represents a valuable knowledge resource. The objective of this survey is to synthesize and present two…
Recent pretrained language models "solved" many reading comprehension benchmarks, where questions are written with access to the evidence document. However, datasets containing information-seeking queries where evidence documents are…
Thousands of complex natural language questions are submitted to community question answering websites on a daily basis, rendering them as one of the most important information sources these days. However, oftentimes submitted questions are…
Tables in Web documents are pervasive and can be directly used to answer many of the queries searched on the Web, motivating their integration in question answering. Very often information presented in tables is succinct and hard to…