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Retrieval augmentation has shown promising improvements in different tasks. However, whether such augmentation can assist a large language model based re-ranker remains unclear. We investigate how to augment T5-based re-rankers using…
The crucial role of the evaluation in the development of the information retrieval tools is useful evidence to improve the performance of these tools and the quality of results that they return. However, the classic evaluation approaches…
To advance understanding on how to engage readers, we advocate the novel task of automatic pull quote selection. Pull quotes are a component of articles specifically designed to catch the attention of readers with spans of text selected…
Search engine logs store detailed information on Web users interactions. Thus, as more and more people use search engines on a daily basis, important trails of users common knowledge are being recorded in those files. Previous research has…
\emph{Verifiability} is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, editors being encouraged to provide citations for the added content. For a Wikipedia article, determining the \emph{citation span} of a citation, i.e. what content is…
Query Segmentation is one of the critical components for understanding users' search intent in Information Retrieval tasks. It involves grouping tokens in the search query into meaningful phrases which help downstream tasks like search…
The query suggestion or auto-completion mechanisms help users to type less while interacting with a search engine. A basic approach that ranks suggestions according to their frequency in the query logs is suboptimal. Firstly, many candidate…
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) are a popular way to document software development knowledge. As creating such documents is expensive, this paper presents an approach for automatically extracting FAQs from sources of software development…
Web search queries can be ambiguous: is "source of the nile" meant to find information on the actual river or on a board game of that name? We tackle this problem by deriving entity-based query interpretations: given some query, the task is…
The World Wide Web caters to the needs of billions of users in heterogeneous groups. Each user accessing the World Wide Web might have his / her own specific interest and would expect the web to respond to the specific requirements. The…
There is an overwhelming number of news articles published every day around the globe. Following the evolution of a news-story is a difficult task given that there is no such mechanism available to track back in time to study the diffusion…
Software developers frequently issue generic natural language queries for code search while using code search engines (e.g., GitHub native search, Krugle). Such queries often do not lead to any relevant results due to vocabulary mismatch…
In this paper we present statistical analysis of English texts from Wikipedia. We try to address the issue of language complexity empirically by comparing the simple English Wikipedia (Simple) to comparable samples of the main English…
Generating factual, long-form text such as Wikipedia articles raises three key challenges: how to gather relevant evidence, how to structure information into well-formed text, and how to ensure that the generated text is factually correct.…
Theoretical frameworks like the Probability Ranking Principle and its more recent Interactive Information Retrieval variant have guided the development of ranking and retrieval algorithms for decades, yet they are not capable of helping us…
As one of the richest sources of encyclopedic information on the Web, Wikipedia generates an enormous amount of traffic. In this paper, we study large-scale article access data of the English Wikipedia in order to compare articles with…
In addition to the traditional task of getting machines to answer questions, a major research question in question answering is to create interesting, challenging questions that can help systems learn how to answer questions and also reveal…
Attribution and fact verification are critical challenges in natural language processing for assessing information reliability. While automated systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) aim to retrieve and select concise evidence to support…
Narratives are fundamental to our understanding of the world, providing us with a natural structure for knowledge representation over time. Computational narrative extraction is a subfield of artificial intelligence that makes heavy use of…
Search engines leverage knowledge to improve information access. In order to effectively leverage knowledge, search engines should account for context, i.e., information about the user and query. In this thesis, we aim to support search…