Related papers: Incorporating Query Term Independence Assumption f…

The state-of-the-art solutions to the vocabulary mismatch in information retrieval (IR) mainly aim at leveraging either the relational semantics provided by external resources or the distributional semantics, recently investigated by deep…

Information retrieval has transitioned from standalone systems into essential components across broader applications, with indexing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and freshness becoming increasingly critical yet often overlooked. In this…

State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. To this end, models generally utilize an encoder-only (like BERT) paradigm or an encoder-decoder (like T5) approach. These paradigms,…

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have been applied to document ranking for information retrieval, which first pre-train a general language model on an unlabeled large corpus and then conduct ranking-specific fine-tuning on…

This review paper explores recent advancements and emerging approaches in Information Retrieval (IR) applied to Natural Language Processing (NLP). We examine traditional IR models such as Boolean, vector space, probabilistic, and inference…

Multiple neural language models have been developed recently, e.g., BERT and XLNet, and achieved impressive results in various NLP tasks including sentence classification, question answering and document ranking. In this paper, we explore…

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…

Vocabulary mismatch is a central problem in information retrieval (IR), i.e., the relevant documents may not contain the same (symbolic) terms of the query. Recently, neural representations have shown great success in capturing semantic…

Neural information retrieval architectures based on transformers such as BERT are able to significantly improve system effectiveness over traditional sparse models such as BM25. Though highly effective, these neural approaches are very…

While large-scale pre-trained language models like BERT have advanced the state-of-the-art in IR, its application in query performance prediction (QPP) is so far based on pointwise modeling of individual queries. Meanwhile, recent studies…

A lot of recent work has focused on sparse learned indexes that use deep neural architectures to significantly improve retrieval quality while keeping the efficiency benefits of the inverted index. While such sparse learned structures…

Neural IR has advanced through two distinct paths: entity-oriented approaches leveraging knowledge graphs and multi-vector models capturing fine-grained semantics. We introduce QDER, a neural re-ranking model that unifies these approaches…

Search engines rely heavily on term-based approaches that represent queries and documents as bags of words. Text---a document or a query---is represented by a bag of its words that ignores grammar and word order, but retains word frequency…

BERT-based text ranking models have dramatically advanced the state-of-the-art in ad-hoc retrieval, wherein most models tend to consider individual query-document pairs independently. In the mean time, the importance and usefulness to…

Deep research has emerged as an important task that aims to address hard queries through extensive open-web exploration. To tackle it, most prior work equips large language model (LLM)-based agents with opaque web search APIs, enabling…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant strides across various information retrieval tasks, particularly as rerankers, owing to their strong generalization and knowledge-transfer capabilities acquired from extensive…

We introduce and define the novel problem of multi-distribution information retrieval (IR) where given a query, systems need to retrieve passages from within multiple collections, each drawn from a different distribution. Some of these…

The core of information retrieval (IR) is to identify relevant information from large-scale resources and return it as a ranked list to respond to the user's information need. In recent years, the resurgence of deep learning has greatly…

As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and…

Medical systematic reviews typically require assessing all the documents retrieved by a search. The reason is two-fold: the task aims for ``total recall''; and documents retrieved using Boolean search are an unordered set, and thus it is…