Related papers: Opacity, Obscurity, and the Geometry of Question-A…
Imagine observing someone scratching their arm; to understand why, additional context would be necessary. However, spotting a mosquito nearby would immediately offer a likely explanation for the person's discomfort, thereby alleviating the…
Positional bias in binary question answering occurs when a model systematically favors one choice over another based solely on the ordering of presented options. In this study, we quantify and analyze positional bias across five large…
The ability to understand a user's underlying needs is critical for conversational systems, especially with limited input from users in a conversation. Thus, in such a domain, Asking Clarification Questions (ACQs) to reveal users' true…
Modern computer systems are ubiquitous in contemporary life yet many of them remain opaque. This poses significant challenges in domains where desiderata such as fairness or accountability are crucial. We suggest that the best strategy for…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
The present study aims to investigate similarities between how humans and connectionist models experience difficulty in arithmetic problems. Problem difficulty was operationalized by the number of carries involved in solving a given…
The usage and amount of information available on the internet increase over the past decade. This digitization leads to the need for automated answering system to extract fruitful information from redundant and transitional knowledge…
Open-domain conversational question answering can be viewed as two tasks: passage retrieval and conversational question answering, where the former relies on selecting candidate passages from a large corpus and the latter requires better…
Traditional information retrieval (such as that offered by web search engines) impedes users with information overload from extensive result pages and the need to manually locate the desired information therein. Conversely,…
Opacity has emerged as a central confidentiality notion for information-flow security in discrete event systems (DES), capturing the requirement that an external observer (intruder) should never be able to determine with certainty whether…
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…
Increasing amounts of available data have led to a heightened need for representing large-scale probabilistic knowledge bases. One approach is to use a probabilistic database, a model with strong assumptions that allow for efficiently…
Questions in open-domain question answering are often ambiguous, allowing multiple interpretations. One approach to handling them is to identify all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question (AQ) and to generate a long-form answer…
Questions form an integral part of our everyday communication, both offline and online. Getting responses to our questions from others is fundamental to satisfying our information need and in extending our knowledge boundaries. A question…
With the breakthrough of multi-modal large language models, answering complex visual questions that demand advanced reasoning abilities and world knowledge has become a much more important testbed for developing AI models than ever.…
Clarification is increasingly becoming a vital factor in various topics of information retrieval, such as conversational search and modern Web search engines. Prompting the user for clarification in a search session can be very beneficial…
Automated decision-making systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, which creates an immediate need for their interpretability and explainability. However, it remains unclear whether users know what insights an explanation offers and,…
What is a question? According to Cox a question can be identified with the set of assertions that constitute possible answers. In this paper we propose a different approach that combines the notion that questions are requests for…
Riddles are concise linguistic puzzles that describe an object or idea through indirect, figurative, or playful clues. They are a longstanding form of creative expression, requiring the solver to interpret hints, recognize patterns, and…
The opacity of typical objects in the world results in occlusion --- an important property of natural scenes that makes inference of the full 3-dimensional structure of the world challenging. The relationship between occlusion and low-level…