Related papers: Is Retriever Merely an Approximator of Reader?

A retriever, which retrieves relevant knowledge pieces from a knowledge base given a context, is an important component in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Retrievers have been introduced in knowledge-grounded dialog systems to…

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework for incorporating external knowledge, usually in the form of a set of documents retrieved from a collection, as a part of a prompt to a large language model (LLM) to potentially improve…

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.…

In recent years researchers have achieved considerable success applying neural network methods to question answering (QA). These approaches have achieved state of the art results in simplified closed-domain settings such as the SQuAD…

Recent work on training neural retrievers for open-domain question answering (OpenQA) has employed both supervised and unsupervised approaches. However, it remains unclear how unsupervised and supervised methods can be used most effectively…

We consider the problem of pretraining a two-stage open-domain question answering (QA) system (retriever + reader) with strong transfer capabilities. The key challenge is how to construct a large amount of high-quality…

Current open-domain question answering systems often follow a Retriever-Reader architecture, where the retriever first retrieves relevant passages and the reader then reads the retrieved passages to form an answer. In this paper, we propose…

While both extractive and generative readers have been successfully applied to the Question Answering (QA) task, little attention has been paid toward the systematic comparison of them. Characterizing the strengths and weaknesses of the two…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising method for addressing some of the memory-related challenges associated with Large Language Models (LLMs). Two separate systems form the RAG pipeline, the retriever and the reader, and the…

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to help Large Language Models (LLMs) to process tasks involving long documents. However, existing retrieval models are not designed for long document retrieval and fail to address…

Conversational search is one of the ultimate goals of information retrieval. Recent research approaches conversational search by simplified settings of response ranking and conversational question answering, where an answer is either…

Retrieval-augmented language models can better adapt to changes in world state and incorporate long-tail knowledge. However, most existing methods retrieve only short contiguous chunks from a retrieval corpus, limiting holistic…

Recent studies have proposed leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as information retrievers through query rewriting. However, for challenging corpora, we argue that enhancing queries alone is insufficient for robust semantic matching;…

The performance of Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) retrieval systems can exhibit sub-optimal behavior, providing text excerpts with varying degrees of irrelevance. Unfortunately, many existing ODQA datasets lack examples specifically…

Comprehensively retrieving diverse documents is crucial to address queries that admit a wide range of valid answers. We introduce retrieve-verify-retrieve (RVR), a multi-round retrieval framework designed to maximize answer coverage.…

Deep recommender systems (DRS) are intensively applied in modern web services. To deal with the massive web contents, DRS employs a two-stage workflow: retrieval and ranking, to generate its recommendation results. The retriever aims to…

Entity Linking (EL) and Relation Extraction (RE) are fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing, serving as critical components in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose ReLiK, a Retriever-Reader architecture for both…

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains…

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…

Considering the limited internal parametric knowledge, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely used to extend the knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs). Despite the extensive efforts on RAG research, in existing…