Related papers: RECONSIDER: Re-Ranking using Span-Focused Cross-At…

Open-domain question answering can be reformulated as a phrase retrieval problem, without the need for processing documents on-demand during inference (Seo et al., 2019). However, current phrase retrieval models heavily depend on sparse…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems trained using reinforcement learning (RL) with reasoning are hampered by inefficient context management, where long, noisy retrieved documents increase costs and degrade performance. We introduce…

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…

In recent years, there have been amazing advances in deep learning methods for machine reading. In machine reading, the machine reader has to extract the answer from the given ground truth paragraph. Recently, the state-of-the-art machine…

Speech-based open-domain question answering (QA over a large corpus of text passages with spoken questions) has emerged as an important task due to the increasing number of users interacting with QA systems via speech interfaces. Passage…

Recent advances in deep neural networks, language modeling and language generation have introduced new ideas to the field of conversational agents. As a result, deep neural models such as sequence-to-sequence, Memory Networks, and the…

Despite recent success in machine reading comprehension (MRC), learning high-quality MRC models still requires large-scale labeled training data, even using strong pre-trained language models (PLMs). The pre-training tasks for PLMs are not…

Recently, open-domain question answering (QA) has been combined with machine comprehension models to find answers in a large knowledge source. As open-domain QA requires retrieving relevant documents from text corpora to answer questions,…

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…

Answer validation in machine reading comprehension (MRC) consists of verifying an extracted answer against an input context and question pair. Previous work has looked at re-assessing the "answerability" of the question given the extracted…

We apply a general recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder framework to community question answering (cQA) tasks. Our approach does not rely on any linguistic processing, and can be applied to different languages or domains. Further…

Current state-of-the-art approaches to cross-modal retrieval process text and visual input jointly, relying on Transformer-based architectures with cross-attention mechanisms that attend over all words and objects in an image. While…

Dense retrievers for open-domain question answering (ODQA) have been shown to achieve impressive performance by training on large datasets of question-passage pairs. In this work we ask whether this dependence on labeled data can be reduced…

In spite of much recent research in the area, it is still unclear whether subject-area question-answering data is useful for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. In this paper, we investigate this question. We collect a large-scale…

Knowledge-intensive visual question answering requires models to effectively use external knowledge to help answer visual questions. A typical pipeline includes a knowledge retriever and an answer generator. However, a retriever that…

Compared to standard retrieval tasks, passage retrieval for conversational question answering (CQA) poses new challenges in understanding the current user question, as each question needs to be interpreted within the dialogue context.…

Retrieval augmented language models have recently become the standard for knowledge intensive tasks. Rather than relying purely on latent semantics within the parameters of large neural models, these methods enlist a semi-parametric memory…

This paper is concerned with open-domain question answering (i.e., OpenQA). Recently, some works have viewed this problem as a reading comprehension (RC) task, and directly applied successful RC models to it. However, the performances of…

The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework utilizes a combination of parametric knowledge and external knowledge to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on open-domain question answering tasks. However, the RAG framework suffers…

Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using fine-tuned language models~(LM) for dense retrieval. However, dense retrievers are hard to train, typically requiring heavily engineered fine-tuning pipelines to realize their full…