Related papers: A Linguistic Study on Relevance Modeling in Inform…

Learning to rank has been intensively studied and widely applied in information retrieval. Typically, a global ranking function is learned from a set of labeled data, which can achieve good performance on average but may be suboptimal for…

This paper concerns a deep learning approach to relevance ranking in information retrieval (IR). Existing deep IR models such as DSSM and CDSSM directly apply neural networks to generate ranking scores, without explicit understandings of…

The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval…

Retrieval-augmented generation has gained popularity as a framework to enhance large language models with external knowledge. However, its effectiveness hinges on the retrieval robustness of the model. If the model lacks retrieval…

Retrieval augmentation is critical when Language Models (LMs) exploit non-parametric knowledge related to the query through external knowledge bases before reasoning. The retrieved information is incorporated into LMs as context alongside…

Information retrieval (IR) evaluation measures are cornerstones for determining the suitability and task performance efficiency of retrieval systems. Their metric and scale properties enable to compare one system against another to…

Neural networks provide new possibilities to automatically learn complex language patterns and query-document relations. Neural IR models have achieved promising results in learning query-document relevance patterns, but few explorations…

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in many domains, they still have a tendency to hallucinate and generate fictitious responses to user requests. This problem can be alleviated by augmenting…

Tables on the Web contain a vast amount of knowledge in a structured form. To tap into this valuable resource, we address the problem of table retrieval: answering an information need with a ranked list of tables. We investigate this…

Modern information retrieval (IR) is no longer consumed primarily by humans but increasingly by large language models (LLMs) via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search. Unlike human users, LLMs are constrained by limited…

Search relevance plays a central role in web e-commerce. While large language models (LLMs) have shown significant results on relevance task, existing benchmarks lack sufficient complexity for comprehensive model assessment, resulting in an…

In computer interfaces in general, especially in information retrieval tasks, it is important to be able to quickly find and retrieve information. State of the art approach, used, for example, in search engines, is not effective as it…

Many online content portals allow users to ask questions to supplement their understanding (e.g., of lectures). While information retrieval (IR) systems may provide answers for such user queries, they do not directly assist content creators…

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs), the quality of retrieved information is critical to the final output. This paper introduces the IRSC benchmark for evaluating the performance of embedding…

Extracting query-document relevance from the sparse, biased clickthrough log is among the most fundamental tasks in the web search system. Prior art mainly learns a relevance judgment model with semantic features of the query and document…

Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) is a critical yet unresolved task for modern search systems, retrieving documents that not only satisfy a query's information need but also adhere to its temporal constraints. This task is shaped by two…

Search engine plays a crucial role in satisfying users' diverse information needs. Recently, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) based text ranking models have achieved huge success in web search. However, many state-of-the-art text ranking…

Relevance and utility are two frequently used measures to evaluate the effectiveness of an information retrieval (IR) system. Relevance emphasizes the aboutness of a result to a query, while utility refers to the result's usefulness or…

Traditional evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems relies on human-annotated relevance labels, which can be both biased and costly at scale. In this context, large language models (LLMs) offer an alternative by allowing us to…

Natural Language Inference (NLI) has been an important task for evaluating language models for Natural Language Understanding, but the logical properties of the task are poorly understood and often mischaracterized. Understanding the notion…