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Large language models with long context windows can answer complex questions directly from full-length academic, technical, and policy documents, but passing entire documents is often costly, slow, and can degrade answer quality while…
Existing open-domain question answering (QA) models are not suitable for real-time usage because they need to process several long documents on-demand for every input query. In this paper, we introduce the query-agnostic indexable…
Answer sentence selection is the task of identifying sentences that contain the answer to a given question. This is an important problem in its own right as well as in the larger context of open domain question answering. We propose a novel…
Most domain adaptation methods for machine reading comprehension (MRC) use a pre-trained question-answer (QA) construction model to generate pseudo QA pairs for MRC transfer. Such a process will inevitably introduce mismatched pairs (i.e.,…
In simple open-domain question answering (QA), dense retrieval has become one of the standard approaches for retrieving the relevant passages to infer an answer. Recently, dense retrieval also achieved state-of-the-art results in multi-hop…
State-of-the-art Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models for Open-domain Question Answering (QA) are typically trained for span selection using distantly supervised positive examples and heuristically retrieved negative examples. This…
Recent advances in open-domain QA have led to strong models based on dense retrieval, but only focused on retrieving textual passages. In this work, we tackle open-domain QA over tables for the first time, and show that retrieval can be…
Retrieving real-time information is a fundamental capability for search-integrated agents in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks are predominantly static and therefore fail to capture the temporal dynamics of information…
We introduce two novel methods, Tree-Search and Self-contextualizing QA, designed to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in question-answering tasks. Tree-Search is a sampling technique specifically created to extract…
Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have significantly improved performance in open-domain question answering (QA) by leveraging external knowledge. However, RALMs still struggle with unanswerable queries, where the retrieved…
Open-domain human-computer conversation has attracted much attention in the field of NLP. Contrary to rule- or template-based domain-specific dialog systems, open-domain conversation usually requires data-driven approaches, which can be…
Question answering (QA) systems for large document collections typically use pipelines that (i) retrieve possibly relevant documents, (ii) re-rank them, (iii) rank paragraphs or other snippets of the top-ranked documents, and (iv) select…
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'…
Open-domain question answering aims at solving the task of locating the answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents. There are two families of solutions available: retriever-readers, and knowledge-graph-based…
Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a challenging task in machine reading comprehension. The main challenge in MCQA is to extract "evidence" from the given context that supports the correct answer. In the OpenbookQA dataset, the…
Continuously-growing data volumes lead to larger generic models. Specific use-cases are usually left out, since generic models tend to perform poorly in domain-specific cases. Our work addresses this gap with a method for selecting…
Open-domain question answering (ODQA) has emerged as a pivotal research spotlight in information systems. Existing methods follow two main paradigms to collect evidence: (1) The \textit{retrieve-then-read} paradigm retrieves pertinent…
In open-domain question answering, a model receives a text question as input and searches for the correct answer using a large evidence corpus. The retrieval step is especially difficult as typical evidence corpora have \textit{millions} of…
Quranic Question Answering presents unique challenges due to the linguistic complexity of Classical Arabic and the semantic richness of religious texts. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework that addresses both passage…
Event argument extraction has long been studied as a sequential prediction problem with extractive-based methods, tackling each argument in isolation. Although recent work proposes generation-based methods to capture cross-argument…