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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…

Most learning approaches treat dimensionality reduction (DR) and clustering separately (i.e., sequentially), but recent research has shown that optimizing the two tasks jointly can substantially improve the performance of both. The premise…

Retrieval models based on dense representations in semantic space have become an indispensable branch for first-stage retrieval. These retrievers benefit from surging advances in representation learning towards compressive global…

Pre-trained language models have been successful in many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown that models such as BERT are not ``structurally ready'' to aggregate textual information into a [CLS] vector for dense…

In this work, we propose a novel and scalable solution to address the challenges of developing efficient dense predictions on edge platforms. Our first key insight is that MultiTask Learning (MTL) and hardware-aware Neural Architecture…

We develop a two-stage retrieval system that combines multiple complementary retrieval methods with a learned reranker and LLM-based reranking, to address the TREC Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) task. In the first stage, we employ hybrid retrieval…

Recent work has shown that more effective dense retrieval models can be obtained by distilling ranking knowledge from an existing base re-ranking model. In this paper, we propose a generic curriculum learning based optimization framework…

Dense retrieval (DR) has the potential to resolve the query understanding challenge in conversational search by matching in the learned embedding space. However, this adaptation is challenging due to DR models' extra needs for supervision…

Conducting text retrieval in a dense learned representation space has many intriguing advantages over sparse retrieval. Yet the effectiveness of dense retrieval (DR) often requires combination with sparse retrieval. In this paper, we…

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate…

Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) share many commonalities, including an agent who learns while interacts, a long-term and complex goal, and an algorithm that explores and adapts. To successfully apply…

Ranker and retriever are two important components in dense passage retrieval. The retriever typically adopts a dual-encoder model, where queries and documents are separately input into two pre-trained models, and the vectors generated by…

Over the last few years, contextualized pre-trained transformer models such as BERT have provided substantial improvements on information retrieval tasks. Recent approaches based on pre-trained transformer models such as BERT, fine-tune…

Recently, information retrieval has seen the emergence of dense retrievers, using neural networks, as an alternative to classical sparse methods based on term-frequency. These models have obtained state-of-the-art results on datasets and…

Pre-trained Transformers (\eg BERT) have been commonly used in existing dense retrieval methods for parameter initialization, and recent studies are exploring more effective pre-training tasks for further improving the quality of dense…

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…

Dense retrievers have achieved impressive performance, but their demand for abundant training data limits their application scenarios. Contrastive pre-training, which constructs pseudo-positive examples from unlabeled data, has shown great…

Current dense retrievers (DRs) are limited in their ability to effectively process misspelled queries, which constitute a significant portion of query traffic in commercial search engines. The main issue is that the pre-trained language…

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 approaches that score documents based on learned dense vectors (i.e., dense retrieval) rather than lexical signals (i.e., conventional retrieval) are increasingly popular. Their ability to identify related documents that do not…