Related papers: Opacity, Obscurity, and the Geometry of Question-A…
Humans often specify tasks incompletely, so assistants must know when and how to ask clarifying questions. However, effective clarification remains challenging in software engineering tasks as not all missing information is equally…
Severe occlusions of objects pose a major challenge for computer vision. We show that two root causes are (1) the loss of visible information and (2) the distracting patterns caused by the occluders. Our approach addresses both causes at…
Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential ambiguity across multiple modalities and ask for help as needed. However, it is not clear what kinds of questions such agents should ask nor how…
Imperfect secrecy in communication systems is investigated. Instead of using equivocation as a measure of secrecy, the distortion that an eavesdropper incurs in producing an estimate of the source sequence is examined. The communication…
Complex answer retrieval (CAR) is the process of retrieving answers to questions that have multifaceted or nuanced answers. In this work, we present two novel approaches for CAR based on the observation that question facets can vary in…
Generating natural questions from an image is a semantic task that requires using vision and language modalities to learn multimodal representations. Images can have multiple visual and language cues such as places, captions, and tags. In…
With the increasing deployment of machine learning systems in practice, transparency and explainability have become serious issues. Contrastive explanations are considered to be useful and intuitive, in particular when it comes to…
Not only correctness but also self-confidence play an important role in improving the quality of knowledge. Undesirable situations such as confident incorrect and unconfident correct knowledge prevent learners from revising their knowledge…
Curiosity serves as a pivotal conduit for human beings to discover and learn new knowledge. Recent advancements of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing have sparked discussions regarding whether these models possess…
This paper introduces a qualitative measure of ambiguity and analyses its relationship with other measures of uncertainty. Probability measures relative likelihoods, while ambiguity measures vagueness surrounding those judgments. Ambiguity…
Query answering routinely employs knowledge graphs to assist the user in the search process. Given a knowledge graph that represents entities and relationships among them, one aims at complementing the search with intuitive but effective…
Query Understanding concerns about inferring the precise intent of search by the user with his formulated query, which is challenging because the queries are often very short and ambiguous. The report discusses the various kind of queries…
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…
Recent work has shown how predictive modeling can endow agents with rich knowledge of their surroundings, improving their ability to act in complex environments. We propose question-answering as a general paradigm to decode and understand…
Human judgments of word similarity have been a popular method of evaluating the quality of word embedding. But it fails to measure the geometry properties such as asymmetry. For example, it is more natural to say "Ellipses are like Circles"…
Question answering (QA) systems are among the most important and rapidly developing research topics in natural language processing (NLP). A reason, therefore, is that a QA system allows humans to interact more naturally with a machine,…
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…
Knowledge can't be disentangled from people. As AI knowledge systems mine vast volumes of work-related data, the knowledge that's being extracted and surfaced is intrinsically linked to the people who create and use it. When predictive…
We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and…
While most of the existing literature focused on human-machine interactions with algorithmic systems in advisory roles, research on human behavior in monitoring or verification processes that are conducted by automated systems remains…