Related papers: Incremental Improvement of a Question Answering Sy…
The rise of personal assistants has made conversational question answering (ConvQA) a very popular mechanism for user-system interaction. State-of-the-art methods for ConvQA over knowledge graphs (KGs) can only learn from crisp…
Language Models (LMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, enabling high-quality text generation through prompting and in-context learning. However, models often struggle with long-context summarization due to positional biases,…
Question Answering (QA) is in increasing demand as the amount of information available online and the desire for quick access to this content grows. A common approach to QA has been to fine-tune a pretrained language model on a…
In this paper, we try to answer the question of how to improve the state-of-the-art methods for relevance ranking in web search by query segmentation. Here, by query segmentation it is meant to segment the input query into segments,…
Reranker models aim to re-rank the passages based on the semantics similarity between the given query and passages, which have recently received more attention due to the wide application of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Most previous…
Recent studies show that Question Answering (QA) based on Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) can be improved by generating an improved answer from the top-k ranked answer sentences (termed GenQA). This allows for synthesizing the information…
This study focuses on a reverse question answering (QA) procedure, in which machines proactively raise questions and humans supply the answers. This procedure exists in many real human-machine interaction applications. However, a crucial…
Existing literature on Question Answering (QA) mostly focuses on algorithmic novelty, data augmentation, or increasingly large pre-trained language models like XLNet and RoBERTa. Additionally, a lot of systems on the QA leaderboards do not…
This paper proposes a novel training method to improve the robustness of Extractive Question Answering (EQA) models. Previous research has shown that existing models, when trained on EQA datasets that include unanswerable questions,…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated significant effectiveness in enhancing large language models (LLMs) for complex multi-hop question answering (QA). For multi-hop QA tasks, current iterative approaches predominantly rely…
The dependency between an adequate question formulation and correct answer selection is a very intriguing but still underexplored area. In this paper, we show that question rewriting (QR) of the conversational context allows to shed more…
Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…
Search systems often employ a re-ranking pipeline, wherein documents (or passages) from an initial pool of candidates are assigned new ranking scores. The process enables the use of highly-effective but expensive scoring functions that are…
Recent advancements in transformer-based models have greatly improved the ability of Question Answering (QA) systems to provide correct answers; in particular, answer sentence selection (AS2) models, core components of retrieval-based…
Question answering (QA) has been the subject of a resurgence over the past years. The said resurgence has led to a multitude of question answering (QA) systems being developed both by companies and research facilities. While a few…
Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in…
Ranking consistently emerges as a primary focus in information retrieval research. Retrieval and ranking models serve as the foundation for numerous applications, including web search, open domain QA, enterprise domain QA, and text-based…
Agentic search -- the task of training agents that iteratively reason, issue queries, and synthesize retrieved information to answer complex questions -- has achieved remarkable progress through reinforcement learning (RL). However,…
A question answering (QA) system is a type of conversational AI that generates natural language answers to questions posed by human users. QA systems often form the backbone of interactive dialogue systems, and have been studied extensively…
We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation…