Related papers: Watsonsim: Overview of a Question Answering Engine

Combining the results of different search engines in order to improve upon their performance has been the subject of many research papers. This has become known as the "Data Fusion" task, and has great promise in dealing with the vast…

We increasingly depend on a variety of data-driven algorithmic systems to assist us in many aspects of life. Search engines and recommender systems amongst others are used as sources of information and to help us in making all sort of…

Multimodal conversational agents are highly desirable because they offer natural and human-like interaction. However, there is a lack of comprehensive end-to-end solutions to support collaborative development and benchmarking. While…

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…

Modern programming frameworks come with large libraries, with diverse applications such as for matching regular expressions, parsing XML files and sending email. Programmers often use search engines such as Google and Bing to learn about…

We present an automatic large language model (LLM) conversion approach that produces uncertainty-aware LLMs capable of estimating uncertainty with every prediction. Our approach is model- and data-agnostic, is computationally-efficient, and…

This paper introduces RETSim (Resilient and Efficient Text Similarity), a lightweight, multilingual deep learning model trained to produce robust metric embeddings for near-duplicate text retrieval, clustering, and dataset deduplication…

We use many search engines on the Internet in our daily lives. However, they are not perfect. Their scoring function may not model our intent or they may accept only text queries even though we want to carry out a similar image search. In…

Large language models (such as OpenAI's Codex) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot multi-task capabilities in the software domain, including code explanation. In this work, we examine if this ability can be used to help with reverse…

We introduce VerifAI, an open-source expert system for biomedical question answering that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a novel post-hoc claim verification mechanism. Unlike standard RAG systems, VerifAI ensures…

We apply a general deep learning framework to address the non-factoid question answering task. Our approach does not rely on any linguistic tools and can be applied to different languages or domains. Various architectures are presented and…

Conversational systems have made significant progress in generating natural language responses. However, their potential as conversational search systems is currently limited due to their passive role in the information-seeking process. One…

There have been a flurry of recent proposals on learned benefit estimators for index tuning. Although these learned estimators show promising improvement over what-if query optimizer calls in terms of the accuracy of estimated index…

We study textual autocomplete---the task of predicting a full sentence from a partial sentence---as a human-machine communication game. Specifically, we consider three competing goals for effective communication: use as few tokens as…

This paper presents an end-to-end response selection model for Track 1 of the 7th Dialogue System Technology Challenges (DSTC7). This task focuses on selecting the correct next utterance from a set of candidates given a partial…

Tool-augmented Large Language Models (TALMs) are known to enhance the skillset of large language models (LLMs), thereby, leading to their improved reasoning abilities across many tasks. While, TALMs have been successfully employed in…

Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a…

Many vision and language tasks require commonsense reasoning beyond data-driven image and natural language processing. Here we adopt Visual Question Answering (VQA) as an example task, where a system is expected to answer a question in…

Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) is an established venue that regularly puts a spotlight upon the recent work advancing the field of conversational search. SCAI'21 was organised as an independent on-line event and featured a shared…

We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios,…