Related papers: Is Retriever Merely an Approximator of Reader?
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…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine document retrieval with a generative model to address complex information seeking tasks like report generation. While the relationship between retrieval quality and generation…
Large Language Models (LLMs)-based text retrieval retrieves documents relevant to search queries based on vector similarities. Documents are pre-encoded offline, while queries arrive in real-time, necessitating an efficient online query…
Tables are an important form of structured data for both human and machine readers alike, providing answers to questions that cannot, or cannot easily, be found in texts. Recent work has designed special models and training paradigms for…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the reliability of large language model (LLM) answers by integrating external knowledge. However, RAG increases the end-to-end inference time since looking for relevant documents from large…
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 today's digital world, seeking answers to health questions on the Internet is a common practice. However, existing question answering (QA) systems often rely on using pre-selected and annotated evidence documents, thus making them…
Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional approaches such as BM25 and Dense…
Many text generation systems benefit from using a retriever to retrieve passages from a textual knowledge corpus (e.g., Wikipedia) which are then provided as additional context to the generator. For open-ended generation tasks (like…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior results across a wide range of tasks, and Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective way to enhance the performance by locating relevant information and placing it into 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…
We propose a simple and effective strategy for data augmentation for low-resource machine reading comprehension (MRC). Our approach first pretrains the answer extraction components of a MRC system on the augmented data that contains…
Frequently asked question (FAQ) retrieval, with the purpose of providing information on frequent questions or concerns, has far-reaching applications in many areas, where a collection of question-answer (Q-A) pairs compiled a priori can be…
Query understanding (QU) aims to accurately infer user intent to improve document retrieval. It plays a vital role in modern search engines. While large language models (LLMs) have made notable progress in this area, their effectiveness has…
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…
The widely used retrieve-and-rerank pipeline faces two critical limitations: they are constrained by the initial retrieval quality of the top-k documents, and the growing computational demands of LLM-based rerankers restrict the number of…
Rapid progress has been made towards question answering (QA) systems that can extract answers from text. Existing neural approaches make use of expensive bi-directional attention mechanisms or score all possible answer spans, limiting…
A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is…
Traditional information retrieval (IR) ranking models process the full text of documents. Newer models based on Transformers, however, would incur a high computational cost when processing long texts, so typically use only snippets from the…
We study the task of retrieving relevant experiments given a query experiment. By experiment, we mean a collection of measurements from a set of `covariates' and the associated `outcomes'. While similar experiments can be retrieved by…