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Training and refreshing a web-scale Question Answering (QA) system for a multi-lingual commercial search engine often requires a huge amount of training examples. One principled idea is to mine implicit relevance feedback from user behavior…
The abundant semi-structured data on the Web, such as HTML-based tables and lists, provide commercial search engines a rich information source for question answering (QA). Different from plain text passages in Web documents, Web tables and…
Retrieving information from correlative paragraphs or documents to answer open-domain multi-hop questions is very challenging. To deal with this challenge, most of the existing works consider paragraphs as nodes in a graph and propose…
Exploratory search is an open-ended information retrieval process that aims at discovering knowledge about a topic or domain rather than searching for a specific answer or piece of information. Conversational interfaces are particularly…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
Scholarly communication is a rapid growing field containing a wealth of knowledge. However, due to its unstructured and document format, it is challenging to extract useful information from them through conventional document retrieval…
Given a graph with textual attributes, we enable users to `chat with their graph': that is, to ask questions about the graph using a conversational interface. In response to a user's questions, our method provides textual replies and…
As one promising way to inquire about any particular information through a dialog with the bot, question answering dialog systems have gained increasing research interests recently. Designing interactive QA systems has always been a…
Conversational search facilitates complex information retrieval by enabling multi-turn interactions between users and the system. Supporting such interactions requires a comprehensive understanding of the conversational inputs to formulate…
Open-domain question answering (OpenQA) is an important branch of textual QA which discovers answers for the given questions based on a large number of unstructured documents. Effectively mining correct answers from the open-domain sources…
This paper challenges a cross-genre document retrieval task, where the queries are in formal writing and the target documents are in conversational writing. In this task, a query, is a sentence extracted from either a summary or a plot of…
A popular recent approach to answering open-domain questions is to first search for question-related passages and then apply reading comprehension models to extract answers. Existing methods usually extract answers from single passages…
Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge…
Closed-book question answering (QA) requires a model to directly answer an open-domain question without access to any external knowledge. Prior work on closed-book QA either directly finetunes or prompts a pretrained language model (LM) to…
This paper is concerned with the task of multi-hop open-domain Question Answering (QA). This task is particularly challenging since it requires the simultaneous performance of textual reasoning and efficient searching. We present a method…
In conversational question answering, users express their information needs through a series of utterances with incomplete context. Typical ConvQA methods rely on a single source (a knowledge base (KB), or a text corpus, or a set of…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have shown substantial benefits in applications such as question answering and multi-turn dialogue \citep{lewis2020retrieval}. However, traditional RAG methods, while leveraging static knowledge…
Conversational search is an emerging topic in the information retrieval community. One of the major challenges to multi-turn conversational search is to model the conversation history to answer the current question. Existing methods either…
Conversational question answering increasingly relies on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge. Yet, most existing studies evaluate RAG methods in isolation and primarily focus on…
Compared to standard retrieval tasks, passage retrieval for conversational question answering (CQA) poses new challenges in understanding the current user question, as each question needs to be interpreted within the dialogue context.…