Related papers: Composite Re-Ranking for Efficient Document Search…

Answer selection (AS) is a critical subtask of the open-domain question answering (QA) problem. The present paper proposes a method called RLAS-BIABC for AS, which is established on attention mechanism-based long short-term memory (LSTM)…

The advent of deep neural networks pre-trained via language modeling tasks has spurred a number of successful applications in natural language processing. This work explores one such popular model, BERT, in the context of document ranking.…

The strong capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them highly effective for zero-shot re-ranking task. Attention-based re-ranking methods, which derive relevance scores directly from attention weights, offer an…

Hybrid search, the integration of lexical and semantic retrieval, has become a cornerstone of modern information retrieval systems, driven by demanding applications like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The architectural design space…

The major task of any e-commerce search engine is to retrieve the most relevant inventory items, which best match the user intent reflected in a query. This task is non-trivial due to many reasons, including ambiguous queries, misaligned…

In this paper, we try to answer the question of how to improve the state-of-the-art methods for relevance ranking in web search by query segmentation. Here, by query segmentation it is meant to segment the input query into segments,…

Recent work has shown the surprising ability of multi-lingual BERT to serve as a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer model for a number of language processing tasks. We combine this finding with a similarly-recently proposal on sentence-level…

In learning-to-rank for information retrieval, a ranking model is automatically learned from the data and then utilized to rank the sets of retrieved documents. Therefore, an ideal ranking model would be a mapping from a document set to a…

Reranker models aim to re-rank the passages based on the semantics similarity between the given query and passages, which have recently received more attention due to the wide application of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Most previous…

Recently, pre-trained contextual models, such as BERT, have shown to perform well in language related tasks. We revisit the design decisions that govern the applicability of these models for the passage re-ranking task in open-domain…

The bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model has recently advanced the state-of-the-art in passage re-ranking. In this paper, we analyze the results produced by a fine-tuned BERT model to better understand the…

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…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) utilizes external knowledge to augment Large Language Models' (LLMs) reliability. For flexibility, agentic RAG employs autonomous, multi-round retrieval and reasoning to resolve queries. Although recent…

Vector databases typically rely on approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search to retrieve the top-k closest vectors to a query in embedding space. While effective, this approach often yields semantically redundant results, missing the…

BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a recently introduced language representation model based upon the transfer learning paradigm. We extend its fine-tuning procedure to address one of its…

In search systems, effectively coordinating the two core objectives of search relevance matching and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for discovering users' interests and enhancing platform revenue. In our prior work PRECTR,…

Type- and token-based embedding architectures are still competing in lexical semantic change detection. The recent success of type-based models in SemEval-2020 Task 1 has raised the question why the success of token-based models on a…

We explore advanced fine-tuning techniques to boost BERT's performance in sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, and semantic textual similarity. Our approach leverages SMART regularization to combat overfitting, improves hyperparameter…

The information retrieval community has made significant progress in improving the efficiency of Dual Encoder (DE) dense passage retrieval systems, making them suitable for latency-sensitive settings. However, many proposed procedures are…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a common way to ground language models in external documents and up-to-date information. Classical retrieval systems relied on lexical methods such as BM25, which rank documents by term overlap with…