Related papers: Retrieve-and-Read: Multi-task Learning of Informat…

We present the Charles University system for the MRL~2023 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval. The goal of the shared task was to develop systems for named entity recognition and question answering in several…

What if Information Retrieval (IR) systems did not just retrieve relevant information that is stored in their indices, but could also "understand" it and synthesise it into a single document? We present a preliminary study that makes a…

This paper presents our submission to the QIAS 2025 shared task on Islamic knowledge understanding and reasoning. We developed a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system that combines sparse and dense retrieval methods with…

Many online content portals allow users to ask questions to supplement their understanding (e.g., of lectures). While information retrieval (IR) systems may provide answers for such user queries, they do not directly assist content creators…

Recent efforts in bioinformatics have achieved tremendous progress in the machine reading of biomedical literature, and the assembly of the extracted biochemical interactions into large-scale models such as protein signaling pathways.…

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) poses a significant challenge in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While mainstream MRC methods predominantly leverage extractive strategies using encoder-only models such as BERT,…

Although information access systems have long supported people in accomplishing a wide range of tasks, we propose broadening the scope of users of information access systems to include task-driven machines, such as machine learning models.…

Multi-hop QA with annotated supporting facts, which is the task of reading comprehension (RC) considering the interpretability of the answer, has been extensively studied. In this study, we define an interpretable reading comprehension…

Recently, there have been significant advances in neural methods for tackling knowledge-intensive tasks such as open domain question answering (QA). These advances are fueled by combining large pre-trained language models with learnable…

Conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) aims to assist computers to understand an natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. Existing methods typically…

This paper proposes a novel neural machine reading model for open-domain question answering at scale. Existing machine comprehension models typically assume that a short piece of relevant text containing answers is already identified and…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a method to extend beyond the pre-trained knowledge of Large Language Models by augmenting the original prompt with relevant passages or documents retrieved by an Information…

Modern Language Models (LMs) are capable of following long and complex instructions that enable a large and diverse set of user requests. While Information Retrieval (IR) models use these LMs as the backbone of their architectures,…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, yet they often struggle with multi-step reasoning due to the unstructured nature of retrieved context. While retrieval-augmented generation…

Despite the significant progress of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, they often produce factual errors due to their limited internal knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enhances LLMs with external knowledge…

This paper is a survey discussing Information Retrieval concepts, methods, and applications. It goes deep into the document and query modelling involved in IR systems, in addition to pre-processing operations such as removing stop words and…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a cornerstone of contemporary NLP, enhancing large language models (LLMs) by allowing them to access richer factual contexts through in-context retrieval. While effective in monolingual…

Inspired by conversational reading comprehension (CRC), this paper studies a novel task of leveraging reviews as a source to build an agent that can answer multi-turn questions from potential consumers of online businesses. We first build a…

We consider the large-scale query-document retrieval problem: given a query (e.g., a question), return the set of relevant documents (e.g., paragraphs containing the answer) from a large document corpus. This problem is often solved in two…

We present Machine Assistant with Reliable Knowledge (MARK), a retrieval-augmented question-answering system designed to support student learning through accurate and contextually grounded responses. The system is built on a…