Related papers: Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Ans…
As the popularity of voice assistants continues to surge, conversational search has gained increased attention in Information Retrieval. However, data sparsity issues in conversational search significantly hinder the progress of supervised…
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.…
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'…
Recent studies on Question Answering (QA) and Conversational QA (ConvQA) emphasize the role of retrieval: a system first retrieves evidence from a large collection and then extracts answers. This open-retrieval ConvQA setting typically…
Conversational Question Generation (CQG) enhances the interactivity of conversational question-answering systems in fields such as education, customer service, and entertainment. However, traditional CQG, focusing primarily on the immediate…
Interacting with a speech interface to query a Question Answering (QA) system is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, QA systems rely on passage retrieval to select candidate contexts and reading comprehension to extract the final…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities, particularly in the domain of question answering (QA). However, their effectiveness in QA is often undermined by the vagueness of user questions. To address this…
Query reformulation aims to alter noisy or ambiguous text sequences into coherent ones closer to natural language questions. This is to prevent errors from propagating in a client-facing pipeline and promote better communication with users.…
A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based question-answering (QA) system enhances a large language model's knowledge by retrieving relevant documents based on user queries. Discrepancies between user queries and document phrasings often…
Conversational question answering aims to provide natural-language answers to users in information-seeking conversations. Existing conversational QA benchmarks compare models with pre-collected human-human conversations, using ground-truth…
Spoken Question Answering (QA) is a key feature of voice assistants, usually backed by multiple QA systems. Users ask questions via spontaneous speech which can contain disfluencies, errors, and informal syntax or phrasing. This is a major…
Conversational information seeking (CIS) systems aim to model the user's information need within the conversational context and retrieve the relevant information. One major approach to modeling the conversational context aims to rewrite the…
Open-domain Question Answering models which directly leverage question-answer (QA) pairs, such as closed-book QA (CBQA) models and QA-pair retrievers, show promise in terms of speed and memory compared to conventional models which retrieve…
Questions Under Discussion (QUD) is a versatile linguistic framework in which discourse progresses as continuously asking questions and answering them. Automatic parsing of a discourse to produce a QUD structure thus entails a complex…
While conversing with chatbots, humans typically tend to ask many questions, a significant portion of which can be answered by referring to large-scale knowledge graphs (KG). While Question Answering (QA) and dialog systems have been…
We present a system for answering questions based on the full text of books (BookQA), which first selects book passages given a question at hand, and then uses a memory network to reason and predict an answer. To improve generalization, we…
Question Answering (QA) datasets are crucial in assessing reading comprehension skills for both machines and humans. While numerous datasets have been developed in English for this purpose, a noticeable void exists in less-resourced…
Conversational systems have made significant progress in generating natural language responses. However, their potential as conversational search systems is currently limited due to their passive role in the information-seeking process. One…
Most previous work on Conversational Query Rewriting employs an end-to-end rewriting paradigm. However, this approach is hindered by the issue of multiple fuzzy expressions within the query, which complicates the simultaneous identification…
We study the problem of joint question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) in this paper. Our intuition is that QA and QG have intrinsic connections and these two tasks could improve each other. On one side, the QA model judges…