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Access to reliable mental health information is vital for early help-seeking, yet expanding knowledge bases is resource-intensive and often misaligned with user needs. This results in poor performance of retrieval systems when presented…
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…
Recent work increasingly focuses on improving the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Among existing methods, Process Reward Models (PRMs) stand out for offering dense, step-wise supervision to guide…
Query recommendations in search engines is a double edged sword, with undeniable benefits but potential of harm. Identifying unsafe queries is necessary to protect users from inappropriate query suggestions. However, identifying these is…
Existing methods for open-retrieval question answering in lower resource languages (LRLs) lag significantly behind English. They not only suffer from the shortcomings of non-English document retrieval, but are reliant on language-specific…
In addition to the frequency of terms in a document collection, the distribution of terms plays an important role in determining the relevance of documents for a given search query. In this paper, term distribution analysis using Fourier…
Iterative data generation and model re-training can effectively align large language models(LLMs) to human preferences. The process of data sampling is crucial, as it significantly influences the success of policy improvement. Repeated…
Query expansion is a well known method to improve the performance of information retrieval systems. In this work we have tested different approaches to extract the candidate query terms from the top ranked documents returned by the…
Online forums facilitate knowledge seeking and sharing on the Web. However, the shared knowledge is not fully utilized due to information overload. Thread retrieval is one method to overcome information overload. In this paper, we propose a…
Multiple web-scale Knowledge Bases, e.g., Freebase, YAGO, NELL, have been constructed using semi-supervised or unsupervised information extraction techniques and many of them, despite their large sizes, are continuously growing. Much…
Query reformulation is a key mechanism to alleviate the linguistic chasm of query in ad-hoc retrieval. Among various solutions, query reduction effectively removes extraneous terms and specifies concise user intent from long queries.…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) couples a retriever with a large language model (LLM) to ground generated responses in external evidence. While this framework enhances factuality and domain adaptability, it faces a key bottleneck:…
Conversational search aims to satisfy users' complex information needs via multiple-turn interactions. The key challenge lies in revealing real users' search intent from the context-dependent queries. Previous studies achieve conversational…
Advanced relevance models, such as those that use large language models (LLMs), provide highly accurate relevance estimations. However, their computational costs make them infeasible for processing large document corpora. To address this,…
Research has been devoted in the past few years to relevance feedback as an effective solution to improve performance of information retrieval systems. Relevance feedback refers to an interactive process that helps to improve the retrieval…
Query performance prediction (QPP) aims to estimate the retrieval quality of a search system for a query without human relevance judgments. Previous QPP methods typically return a single scalar value and do not require the predicted values…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to a surge of interest in query augmentation for information retrieval (IR). Two main approaches have emerged. The first prompts LLMs to generate answers or pseudo-documents that…
Motivated by recent commentary that has questioned today's pursuit of ever-more complex models and mathematical formalisms in applied machine learning and whether meaningful empirical progress is actually being made, this paper tries to…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) prevails in Large Language Models. It mainly consists of retrieval and generation. The retrieval modules (a.k.a. retrievers) aim to find useful information used to facilitate the generation modules…
Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the…