Related papers: Designing a Minimal Retrieve-and-Read System for O…
This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where…
Question answering (QA) is a high-level ability of natural language processing. Most extractive ma-chine reading comprehension models focus on factoid questions (e.g., who, when, where) and restrict the output answer as a short and…
Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where safety depends not only on how a system answers, but also on whether a query should be answered given a knowledge base (KB). Out-of-domain…
While there has been substantial progress in factoid question-answering (QA), answering complex questions remains challenging, typically requiring both a large body of knowledge and inference techniques. Open Information Extraction (Open…
Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions with an external large-scale knowledge corpus. However, real-world knowledge is not static; it updates and evolves continually. Such a dynamic characteristic of…
In the constantly evolving field of cybersecurity, it is imperative for analysts to stay abreast of the latest attack trends and pertinent information that aids in the investigation and attribution of cyber-attacks. In this work, we…
Multi-hop question answering (QA) requires systems to iteratively retrieve evidence and reason across multiple hops. While recent RAG and agentic methods report strong results, the underlying retrieval--reasoning \emph{process} is often…
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…
The objective of automated Question Answering (QA) systems is to provide answers to user queries in a time efficient manner. The answers are usually found in either databases (or knowledge bases) or a collection of documents commonly…
Modern QA systems entail retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate and trustworthy responses. However, the inherent gap between user queries and relevant documents hinders precise matching. We introduce QAEncoder, a training-free…
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…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been shown to enhance the factual accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs), but existing methods often suffer from limited reasoning capabilities in effectively using the retrieved evidence,…
End-to-end question answering (QA) requires both information retrieval (IR) over a large document collection and machine reading comprehension (MRC) on the retrieved passages. Recent work has successfully trained neural IR systems using…
This decade has seen a great deal of progress in the development of information retrieval systems. Unfortunately, we still lack a systematic understanding of the behavior of the systems and their relationship with documents. In this paper…
The paper presents an open-domain Question Answering system for Romanian, answering COVID-19 related questions. The QA system pipeline involves automatic question processing, automatic query generation, web searching for the top 10 most…
A fundamental trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency needs to be balanced when designing an online question answering system. Effectiveness comes from sophisticated functions such as extractive machine reading comprehension (MRC),…
The task of information retrieval is an important component of many natural language processing systems, such as open domain question answering. While traditional methods were based on hand-crafted features, continuous representations based…
Any system which performs goal-directed continual learning must not only learn incrementally but process and absorb information incrementally. Such a system also has to understand when its goals have been achieved. In this paper, we…
Open book question answering is a type of natural language based QA (NLQA) where questions are expected to be answered with respect to a given set of open book facts, and common knowledge about a topic. Recently a challenge involving such…