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

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) with multiple-choice questions requires the machine to read given passage and select the correct answer among several candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Convolutional Spatial…

Open-domain question answering relies on efficient passage retrieval to select candidate contexts, where traditional sparse vector space models, such as TF-IDF or BM25, are the de facto method. In this work, we show that retrieval can be…

Open domain conversational agents can answer a broad range of targeted queries. However, the sequential nature of interaction with these systems makes knowledge exploration a lengthy task which burdens the user with asking a chain of well…

Contrastive learning has been the dominant approach to training dense retrieval models. In this work, we investigate the impact of ranking context - an often overlooked aspect of learning dense retrieval models. In particular, we examine…

Similar question retrieval is a core task in community-based question answering (CQA) services. To balance the effectiveness and efficiency, the question retrieval system is typically implemented as multi-stage rankers: The first-stage…

Modern enterprise retrieval systems must handle short, underspecified queries such as ``foreign transaction fee refund'' and ``recent check status''. In these cases, semantic nuance and metadata matter but per-query large language model…

Question answering (QA) is a high-level ability of natural language processing. Most extractive ma-chine reading comprehension models focus on factoid questions (e.g., who, when, where) and restrict the output answer as a short and…

In this paper, we introduce the Reinforced Mnemonic Reader for machine reading comprehension tasks, which enhances previous attentive readers in two aspects. First, a reattention mechanism is proposed to refine current attentions by…

While numerous methods have been proposed as defenses against adversarial examples in question answering (QA), these techniques are often model specific, require retraining of the model, and give only marginal improvements in performance…

Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs. Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of…

Existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) models do not scale effectively to real-world applications like web-level information retrieval and question answering (QA). We argue that this stems from the nature of MRC datasets: most of…

Rerankers, typically cross-encoders, are computationally intensive but are frequently used because they are widely assumed to outperform cheaper initial IR systems. We challenge this assumption by measuring reranker performance for full…

This paper proposes a novel neural machine reading model for open-domain question answering at scale. Existing machine comprehension models typically assume that a short piece of relevant text containing answers is already identified and…

We study calibration in question answering, estimating whether model correctly predicts answer for each question. Unlike prior work which mainly rely on the model's confidence score, our calibrator incorporates information about the input…

Built upon the existing analysis of retrieval heads in large language models, we propose an alternative reranking framework that trains models to estimate passage-query relevance using the attention scores of selected heads. This approach…

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…

To produce a domain-agnostic question answering model for the Machine Reading Question Answering (MRQA) 2019 Shared Task, we investigate the relative benefits of large pre-trained language models, various data sampling strategies, as well…

The conventional paradigm in neural question answering (QA) for narrative content is limited to a two-stage process: first, relevant text passages are retrieved and, subsequently, a neural network for machine comprehension extracts the…

Current methods in open-domain question answering (QA) usually employ a pipeline of first retrieving relevant documents, then applying strong reading comprehension (RC) models to that retrieved text. However, modern RC models are complex…

In knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (OpenQA), large language models (LLMs) often struggle to generate factual answers, relying solely on their internal (parametric) knowledge. To address this limitation,…