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Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their popularity…
People searching for information occasionally experience difficulties finding what they want on the Web. This might happen if they cannot quite come up with the right search terms. What do searchers do when this happens? Intuitively one…
Current conversational passage retrieval systems cast conversational search into ad-hoc search by using an intermediate query resolution step that places the user's question in context of the conversation. While the proposed methods have…
This paper evaluates the robustness of learning from implicit feedback in web search. In particular, we create a model of user behavior by drawing upon user studies in laboratory and real-world settings. The model is used to understand the…
We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully…
Existing conversational search studies mainly focused on asking better clarifying questions and/or improving search result quality. These works aim at retrieving better responses according to the search context, and their performances are…
Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting…
Natural language is hypothetically the best user interface for many domains. However, general models that provide an interface between natural language and any other domain still do not exist. Providing natural language interface to…
Clarifying user's information needs is an essential component of modern search systems. While most of the approaches for constructing clarifying prompts rely on query facets, the impact of the quality of the facets is relatively unexplored.…
Natural language processing applications, such as conversational agents and their question-answering capabilities, are widely used in the real world. Despite the wide popularity of large language models (LLMs), few real-world conversational…
This chapter presents a theoretical framework for evaluating next generation search engines. We focus on search engines whose results presentation is enriched with additional information and does not merely present the usual list of 10 blue…
We present GenEx, a generative model to explain search results to users beyond just showing matches between query and document words. Adding GenEx explanations to search results greatly impacts user satisfaction and search performance.…
Query reformulation is a key mechanism to alleviate the linguistic chasm of query in ad-hoc retrieval. Among various solutions, query reduction effectively removes extraneous terms and specifies concise user intent from long queries.…
Different search engines provide different outputs for the same keyword. This may be due to different definitions of relevance, and/or to different knowledge/anticipation of users' preferences, but rankings are also suspected to be biased…
Among the most important properties of algorithms investigated in computer science are soundness, completeness, and complexity. These properties, however, are rarely analyzed for the vast collection of recently proposed methods for planning…
Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with "word salad" text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more…
Quantifying bias in retrieval functions through document retrievability scores is vital for assessing recall-oriented retrieval systems. However, many studies investigating retrieval model bias lack validation of their query generation…
Exploiting information induced from (query-specific) clustering of top-retrieved documents has long been proposed as a means for improving precision at the very top ranks of the returned results. We present a novel language model approach…
Web search is an integral part of our daily lives. Recently, there has been a trend of personalization in Web search, where different users receive different results for the same search query. The increasing level of personalization is…
In conversational search, agents can interact with users by asking clarifying questions to increase their chance to find better results. Many recent works and shared tasks in both NLP and IR communities have focused on identifying the need…