Related papers: Incremental Improvement of a Question Answering Sy…

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging…

Biomedical question-answering (QA) systems require effective retrieval and generation components to ensure accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. This study systematically examines a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for…

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…

The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval…

Increasing test-time computation has emerged as a promising direction for improving language model performance, particularly in scenarios where model finetuning is impractical or impossible due to computational constraints or private model…

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) involves multiple subtasks, i) to understand incomplete questions in their context, ii) to retrieve relevant information, and iii) to generate answers. This work presents PRAISE, a pipeline-based…

Information retrieval systems such as open web search and recommendation systems are ubiquitous and significantly impact how people receive and consume online information. Previous research has shown the importance of fairness in…

Answer selection (answer ranking) is one of the key steps in many kinds of question answering (QA) applications, where deep models have achieved state-of-the-art performance. Among these deep models, recurrent neural network (RNN) based…

Reranking is attracting incremental attention in the recommender systems, which rearranges the input ranking list into the final rank-ing list to better meet user demands. Most existing methods greedily rerank candidates through the rating…

Most research on question answering focuses on the pre-deployment stage; i.e., building an accurate model for deployment. In this paper, we ask the question: Can we improve QA systems further \emph{post-}deployment based on user…

This paper introduces an approach for training o1-like RAG models that retrieve and reason over relevant information step by step before generating the final answer. Conventional RAG methods usually perform a single retrieval step before…

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in improving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite these advances, its effectiveness in multi-hop question answering (QA) remains limited by two fundamental limitations: (i) global…

Deep learning based question answering (QA) on English documents has achieved success because there is a large amount of English training examples. However, for most languages, training examples for high-quality QA models are not available.…

Question answering (QA) systems are among the most important and rapidly developing research topics in natural language processing (NLP). A reason, therefore, is that a QA system allows humans to interact more naturally with a machine,…

We propose EAR, a query Expansion And Reranking approach for improving passage retrieval, with the application to open-domain question answering. EAR first applies a query expansion model to generate a diverse set of queries, and then uses…

Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple…

In today's digital world, seeking answers to health questions on the Internet is a common practice. However, existing question answering (QA) systems often rely on using pre-selected and annotated evidence documents, thus making them…

Recent studies on reasoning models explore the meta-awareness of language models, the ability to know how to think by itself. We argue that large reasoning models lack this meta-awareness property by proving severe misalignment between true…

Reasoning-augmented search agents, such as Search-R1, are trained to reason, search, and generate the final answer iteratively. Nevertheless, due to their limited capabilities in reasoning and search, their performance on multi-hop QA…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved multi-hop question answering (QA) through direct Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, the irreversible nature of CoT leads to error accumulation, making it…