Related papers: BERT-CoQAC: BERT-based Conversational Question Ans…

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and unsatisfactory.…

Query expansion aims to mitigate the mismatch between the language used in a query and in a document. However, query expansion methods can suffer from introducing non-relevant information when expanding the query. To bridge this gap,…

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…

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with information retrieval capabilities (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)) has proven beneficial for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, understanding users' contextual search intent when…

Automatic short answer grading is an important research direction in the exploration of how to use artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to improve education. Current state-of-the-art approaches use neural language models to create…

Quotations are crucial for successful explanations and persuasions in interpersonal communications. However, finding what to quote in a conversation is challenging for both humans and machines. This work studies automatic quotation…

While neural models have been shown to exhibit strong performance on single-turn visual question answering (VQA) tasks, extending VQA to a multi-turn, conversational setting remains a challenge. One way to address this challenge is to…

Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In…

Multi-Turn Long-Form Question Answering (MT-LFQA) is a key application paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive domains. However, existing benchmarks are limited to single-turn dialogue, while multi-turn dialogue…

Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in…

How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…

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.…

This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations, including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain…

Existing tools for Question Answering (QA) have challenges that limit their use in practice. They can be complex to set up or integrate with existing infrastructure, do not offer configurable interactive interfaces, and do not cover the…

Question Answering (QA) has shown great success thanks to the availability of large-scale datasets and the effectiveness of neural models. Recent research works have attempted to extend these successes to the settings with few or no labeled…

Conversational question-answering (CQA) systems aim to create interactive search systems that effectively retrieve information by interacting with users. To replicate human-to-human conversations, existing work uses human annotators to play…

This particular paper introduces an Adaptive Context Management (ACM) framework for the Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) systems. The key objective of the ACM framework is to optimize the use of the conversation history by…

Large, transformer-based pretrained language models like BERT, GPT, and T5 have demonstrated a deep understanding of contextual semantics and language syntax. Their success has enabled significant advances in conversational AI, including…

In conversational question answering, systems must correctly interpret the interconnected interactions and generate knowledgeable answers, which may require the retrieval of relevant information from a background repository. Recent…

Chart question answering (CQA) is a task used for assessing chart comprehension, which is fundamentally different from understanding natural images. CQA requires analyzing the relationships between the textual and the visual components of a…