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Sequence-to-sequence neural network models for generation of conversational responses tend to generate safe, commonplace responses (e.g., "I don't know") regardless of the input. We suggest that the traditional objective function, i.e., the…
Recent progress in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is driving fast-paced advances in Information Retrieval (IR), largely owed to fine-tuning deep language models (LMs) for document ranking. While remarkably effective, the ranking…
Retrieving user-specified objects from complex scenes remains a challenging task, especially when queries are ambiguous or involve multiple similar objects. Existing open-vocabulary detectors operate in a one-shot manner, lacking the…
Large language models (LLMs) can effectively elicit human preferences through multi-turn dialogue. Complex tasks can be accomplished through iterative clarifying questions and final responses generated by an LLM acting as a questioner…
In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive…
Conversational search aims to satisfy users' complex information needs via multiple-turn interactions. The key challenge lies in revealing real users' search intent from the context-dependent queries. Previous studies achieve conversational…
Understanding human intent is a complex, high-level task for large language models (LLMs), requiring analytical reasoning, contextual interpretation, dynamic information aggregation, and decision-making under uncertainty. Real-world public…
With the increasing research attention on fairness in information retrieval systems, more and more fairness-aware algorithms have been proposed to ensure fairness for a sustainable and healthy retrieval ecosystem. However, as the most…
This paper introduces the task of product demand clarification within an e-commercial scenario, where the user commences the conversation with ambiguous queries and the task-oriented agent is designed to achieve more accurate and tailored…
Conversational systems have a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. In this module, there is a task known as an intent classification that aims at identifying what a user is attempting to achieve from an utterance. Previous works use…
While numerous studies have been conducted in the literature exploring different types of machine learning approaches for search ranking, most of them are focused on specific pre-defined problems but only a few of them have studied the…
Recent breakthroughs of pretrained language models have shown the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In addition to standard syntactic and semantic NLP tasks, pretrained…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of dialog systems, yet current approaches often fail to provide accurate guidance of topic due to their inability to discern user confusion in…
Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search,…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) often respond even when prompts omit critical details or include misleading information, leading to hallucinations or reinforced misconceptions. We study how to evaluate and improve LLMs' ability to decide when…
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…
Query understanding plays a key role in exploring users' search intents and facilitating users to locate their most desired information. However, it is inherently challenging since it needs to capture semantic information from short and…
Precisely understanding users' contextual search intent has been an important challenge for conversational search. As conversational search sessions are much more diverse and long-tailed, existing methods trained on limited data still show…
Information-seeking dialogue systems are widely used in e-commerce systems, with answers that must be tailored to fit the specific settings of the online system. Given the user query, the information-seeking dialogue systems first retrieve…