Related papers: Multi-step Retriever-Reader Interaction for Scalab…

Open-domain question answering over datalakes requires retrieving and composing information from multiple tables, a challenging subtask that demands semantic relevance and structural coherence (e.g., joinability). While exact optimization…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to access external knowledge sources, but the effectiveness of RAG relies on the coordination between the retriever and the generator. Since these components are…

Building automatic technical support system is an important yet challenge task. Conceptually, to answer a user question on a technical forum, a human expert has to first retrieve relevant documents, and then read them carefully to identify…

Prompting-based large language models (LLMs) are surprisingly powerful at generating natural language reasoning steps or Chains-of-Thoughts (CoT) for multi-step question answering (QA). They struggle, however, when the necessary knowledge…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems face significant challenges in multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where complex queries require synthesizing information across multiple document chunks. Existing approaches typically rely on…

Clarification resolution plays an important role in various information retrieval tasks such as interactive question answering and conversational search. In such context, the user often formulates their information needs as short and…

In the era of large language models, applying techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation can better address Open-Domain Question-Answering problems. Due to constraints including model sizes and computing resources, the length of…

Question answering (QA) systems for large document collections typically use pipelines that (i) retrieve possibly relevant documents, (ii) re-rank them, (iii) rank paragraphs or other snippets of the top-ranked documents, and (iv) select…

Open-domain question answering (QA) systems are often built with retrieval modules. However, retrieving passages from a given source is known to suffer from insufficient knowledge coverage. Alternatively, prompting large language models…

Large language models (LLMs) typically enhance their performance through either the retrieval of semantically similar information or the improvement of their reasoning capabilities. However, a significant challenge remains in effectively…

General Question Answering (QA) systems over texts require the multi-hop reasoning capability, i.e. the ability to reason with information collected from multiple passages to derive the answer. In this paper we conduct a systematic analysis…

In table-text open-domain question answering, a retriever system retrieves relevant evidence from tables and text to answer questions. Previous studies in table-text open-domain question answering have two common challenges: firstly, their…

We present 3 different question-answering models trained on the SQuAD2.0 dataset -- BIDAF, DocumentQA and ALBERT Retro-Reader -- demonstrating the improvement of language models in the past three years. Through our research in fine-tuning…

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires the model to explore and connect relevant information from multiple sentences/documents in order to answer the question about the context. To achieve this, we propose an interpretable 3-module system…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in numerous tasks but still heavily rely on knowledge stored in their parameters. Moreover, updating this knowledge incurs high training costs. Retrieval-augmented generation…

In conversational machine reading, systems need to interpret natural language rules, answer high-level questions such as "May I qualify for VA health care benefits?", and ask follow-up clarification questions whose answer is necessary to…

Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. We argue that both are suboptimal, since…

Open-domain extractive question answering works well on textual data by first retrieving candidate texts and then extracting the answer from those candidates. However, some questions cannot be answered by text alone but require information…

State-of-the-art Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models for Open-domain Question Answering (QA) are typically trained for span selection using distantly supervised positive examples and heuristically retrieved negative examples. This…

Most approaches to Open-Domain Question Answering consist of a light-weight retriever that selects a set of candidate passages, and a computationally expensive reader that examines the passages to identify the correct answer. Previous works…