Related papers: TREC CAsT 2019: The Conversational Assistance Trac…

In a conversational context, a user expresses her multi-faceted information need as a sequence of natural-language questions, i.e., utterances. Starting from a given topic, the conversation evolves through user utterances and system…

Conversational information seeking has evolved rapidly in the last few years with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the basis for interpreting and responding in a naturalistic manner to user requests. The extended…

The Deep Learning Track is a new track for TREC 2019, with the goal of studying ad hoc ranking in a large data regime. It is the first track with large human-labeled training sets, introducing two sets corresponding to two tasks, each with…

Conversational Information Seeking has evolved rapidly in the last few years with the development of Large Language Models providing the basis for interpreting and responding in a naturalistic manner to user requests. iKAT emphasizes the…

Searching for new information requires talking to the system. In this research, an Open-domain Conversational information search system has been developed. This system has been implemented using the TREC CAsT 2019 track, which is one of the…

Conversational passage retrieval relies on question rewriting to modify the original question so that it no longer depends on the conversation history. Several methods for question rewriting have recently been proposed, but they were…

The Podcast Track is new at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 2020. The podcast track was designed to encourage research into podcasts in the information retrieval and NLP research communities. The track consisted of two shared tasks:…

Research on conversational search has so far mostly focused on query rewriting and multi-stage passage retrieval. However, synthesizing the top retrieved passages into a complete, relevant, and concise response is still an open challenge.…

In this paper, we report our methods and experiments for the TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) 2022. In this work, we aim to reproduce multi-stage retrieval pipelines and explore one of the potential benefits of involving…

Information needs around a topic cannot be satisfied in a single turn; users typically ask follow-up questions referring to the same theme and a system must be capable of understanding the conversational context of a request to retrieve…

Conversational interfaces provide a flexible and easy way for users to seek information that may otherwise be difficult or inconvenient to obtain. However, existing interfaces generally fall into one of two categories: FAQs, where users…

This paper presents our approach to the TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT), which focuses on improving conversational information-seeking (CIS) systems. While recent advancements in CIS have improved conversational agents'…

Pre-trained language models have been widely exploited to learn dense representations of documents and queries for information retrieval. While previous efforts have primarily focused on improving effectiveness and user satisfaction,…

The second edition of the TREC Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Track advances research on systems that integrate retrieval and generation to address complex, real-world information needs. Building on the foundation of the inaugural…

This paper describes the participation of UvA.ILPS group at the TREC CAsT 2020 track. Our passage retrieval pipeline consists of (i) an initial retrieval module that uses BM25, and (ii) a re-ranking module that combines the score of a BERT…

We consider a new perspective on dialog state tracking (DST), the task of estimating a user's goal through the course of a dialog. By formulating DST as a semantic parsing task over hierarchical representations, we can incorporate semantic…

The NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation - Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS) challenge 2019 was an open evaluation for the task of speaker verification in challenging conditions. In this paper, we provide a detailed account of the LEAP…

Retrieving paragraphs to populate a Wikipedia article is a challenging task. The new TREC Complex Answer Retrieval (TREC CAR) track introduces a comprehensive dataset that targets this retrieval scenario. We present early results from a…

Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…

We present RACE, a new dataset for benchmark evaluation of methods in the reading comprehension task. Collected from the English exams for middle and high school Chinese students in the age range between 12 to 18, RACE consists of near…