Related papers: QR2: A Third-party Query Reranking Service Over We…

Information retrieval systems such as open web search and recommendation systems are ubiquitous and significantly impact how people receive and consume online information. Previous research has shown the importance of fairness in…

This presentation focuses on the importance of web crawling and page ranking algorithms in dealing with the massive amount of data present on the World Wide Web. As the web continues to grow exponentially, efficient search and retrieval…

A large number of web databases are only accessible through proprietary form-like interfaces which require users to query the system by entering desired values for a few attributes. A key restriction enforced by such an interface is the…

Retrieving relevant tables containing the necessary information to accurately answer a given question over tables is critical to open-domain question-answering (QA) systems. Previous methods assume the answer to such a question can be found…

Modern IR systems are an extremely important tool for seeking information. In addition to search, such systems include a number of query reformulation methods, such as query expansion and query recommendations, to provide high quality…

Learning to rank (LTR) is widely employed in web searches to prioritize pertinent webpages from retrieved content based on input queries. However, traditional LTR models encounter two principal obstacles that lead to suboptimal performance:…

A significant amount of the world's knowledge is stored in relational databases. However, the ability for users to retrieve facts from a database is limited due to a lack of understanding of query languages such as SQL. We propose Seq2SQL,…

Rank fusion is a powerful technique that allows multiple sources of information to be combined into a single result set. However, to date fusion has not been regarded as being cost-effective in cases where strict per-query efficiency…

Ranking is a central task in machine learning and information retrieval. In this task, it is especially important to present the user with a slate of items that is appealing as a whole. This in turn requires taking into account interactions…

With the rapid advance of the Internet, search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, Yahoo!) are used by billions of users for each day. The main function of a search engine is to locate the most relevant webpages corresponding to what the user…

Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…

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…

While current tasks of converting natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) using Foundation Models have shown impressive achievements, adapting these approaches for converting natural language to Graph Query Language (NL2GQL) encounters hurdles due…

E-commerce information retrieval (IR) systems struggle to simultaneously achieve high accuracy in interpreting complex user queries and maintain efficient processing of vast product catalogs. The dual challenge lies in precisely matching…

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 World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user's primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find…

Query optimization has played a central role in database research for decades. However, more often than not, the proposed optimization techniques lead to a performance improvement in some, but not in all, situations. Therefore, we urgently…

In e-commerce, high consideration search missions typically require careful and elaborate decision making, and involve a substantial research investment from customers. We consider the task of identifying High Consideration (HC) queries.…

There are several ideas being used today for Web information retrieval, and specifically in Web search engines. The PageRank algorithm is one of those that introduce a content-neutral ranking function over Web pages. This ranking is applied…

Building high quality cloud applications becomes an urgently required research problem. Nonfunctional performance of cloud services is usually described by quality-of-service (QoS). In cloud applications, cloud services are invoked remotely…