Related papers: A Comparison of Question Rewriting Methods for Con…

This paper investigates the task of writer retrieval, which identifies documents authored by the same individual within a dataset based on handwriting similarities. While existing datasets and methodologies primarily focus on page level…

Retrieval-based conversation systems generally tend to highly rank responses that are semantically similar or even identical to the given conversation context. While the system's goal is to find the most appropriate response, rather than…

Information retrieval systems have traditionally relied on exact term match methods such as BM25 for first-stage retrieval. However, recent advancements in neural network-based techniques have introduced a new method called dense retrieval.…

With the rise of multimodal learning, image retrieval plays a crucial role in connecting visual information with natural language queries. Existing image retrievers struggle with processing long texts and handling unclear user expressions.…

Recent research has shown that mixed-initiative conversational search, based on the interaction between users and computers to clarify and improve a query, provides enormous advantages. Nonetheless, incorporating additional information…

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and…

Conversational information seeking (CIS) systems aim to model the user's information need within the conversational context and retrieve the relevant information. One major approach to modeling the conversational context aims to rewrite the…

Passage retrieval and ranking is a key task in open-domain question answering and information retrieval. Current effective approaches mostly rely on pre-trained deep language model-based retrievers and rankers. These methods have been shown…

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…

Language models often struggle with cross-mode knowledge retrieval -- the ability to access knowledge learned in one format (mode) when queried in another. We demonstrate that models trained on multiple data sources (e.g., Wikipedia and…

With the improvements in speech recognition and voice generation technologies over the last years, a lot of companies have sought to develop conversation understanding systems that run on mobile phones or smart home devices through natural…

Questions asked by humans during a conversation often contain contextual dependencies, i.e., explicit or implicit references to previous dialogue turns. These dependencies take the form of coreferences (e.g., via pronoun use) or ellipses,…

This paper describes a compact and effective model for low-latency passage retrieval in conversational search based on learned dense representations. Prior to our work, the state-of-the-art approach uses a multi-stage pipeline comprising…

Conversational query reformulation (CQR) has become indispensable for improving retrieval in dialogue-based applications. However, existing approaches typically rely on reference passages for optimization, which are impractical to acquire…

In this work, we analyze a pseudo-relevance retrieval method based on the results of web search engines. By enriching topics with text data from web search engine result pages and linked contents, we train topic-specific and cost-efficient…

Dense retrievers in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems exhibit systematic biases -- including brevity, position, literal matching, and repetition biases -- that can compromise retrieval quality. Query rewriting techniques are now…

This article evaluates the performance of two techniques for query reformulation in a system for information retrieval, namely, the concept based and the pseudo relevance feedback reformulation. The experiments performed on a corpus of…

We address the task of sentence retrieval for open-ended dialogues. The goal is to retrieve sentences from a document corpus that contain information useful for generating the next turn in a given dialogue. Prior work on dialogue-based…

Context modeling has a pivotal role in open domain conversation. Existing works either use heuristic methods or jointly learn context modeling and response generation with an encoder-decoder framework. This paper proposes an explicit…

Rapid response, namely low latency, is fundamental in search applications; it is particularly so in interactive search sessions, such as those encountered in conversational settings. An observation with a potential to reduce latency asserts…