Related papers: A Discriminative Semantic Ranker for Question Retr…

Given its effectiveness on knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks, dense retrieval models have become increasingly popular. Specifically, the de-facto architecture for open-domain question answering uses two isomorphic…

Retrieval module can be plugged into many downstream NLP tasks to improve their performance, such as open-domain question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. The key to a retrieval system is to calculate relevance scores to query…

Neural retrieval models have superseded classic bag-of-words methods such as BM25 as the retrieval framework of choice. However, neural systems lack the interpretability of bag-of-words models; it is not trivial to connect a query change to…

Ranking responses for a given dialogue context is a popular benchmark in which the setup is to re-rank the ground-truth response over a limited set of $n$ responses, where $n$ is typically 10. The predominance of this setup in conversation…

Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) enables access to multilingual knowledge but remains challenging due to disparities in resources, scripts, and weak cross-lingual semantic alignment in embedding models. Existing pipelines often…

The rapid expansion of Earth Science data from satellite observations, reanalysis products, and numerical simulations has created a critical bottleneck in scientific discovery, namely identifying relevant datasets for a given research…

In modern e-commerce search systems, dense retrieval has become an indispensable component. By computing similarities between query and item (product) embeddings, it efficiently selects candidate products from large-scale repositories. With…

Long-context multiple-choice question answering tasks require robust reasoning over extensive text sources. Since most of the pre-trained transformer models are restricted to processing only a few hundred words at a time, successful…

Question retrieval is a crucial subtask for community question answering. Previous research focus on supervised models which depend heavily on training data and manual feature engineering. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised…

A vital step towards the widespread adoption of neural retrieval models is their resource efficiency throughout the training, indexing and query workflows. The neural IR community made great advancements in training effective dual-encoder…

State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. To this end, models generally utilize an encoder-only (like BERT) paradigm or an encoder-decoder (like T5) approach. These paradigms,…

Dual-encoder-based dense retrieval models have become the standard in IR. They employ large Transformer-based language models, which are notoriously inefficient in terms of resources and latency. We propose Fast-Forward indexes -- vector…

Information retrieval (IR) or knowledge retrieval, is a critical component for many down-stream tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA). It is also very challenging, as it requires succinctness, completeness, and correctness. In…

Knowledge-intensive multi-hop question answering (QA) tasks, which require integrating evidence from multiple sources to address complex queries, often necessitate multiple rounds of retrieval and iterative generation by large language…

Knowledge-intensive visual question answering requires models to effectively use external knowledge to help answer visual questions. A typical pipeline includes a knowledge retriever and an answer generator. However, a retriever that…

We introduce ART, a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require any labeled training data. Dense retrieval is a central challenge for open-domain tasks, such as Open QA, where…

A fundamental goal of search engines is to identify, given a query, documents that have relevant text. This is intrinsically difficult because the query and the document may use different vocabulary, or the document may contain query words…

Interactive speech recognition systems must generate words quickly while also producing accurate results. Two-pass models excel at these requirements by employing a first-pass decoder that quickly emits words, and a second-pass decoder that…

Open-domain extractive question answering works well on textual data by first retrieving candidate texts and then extracting the answer from those candidates. However, some questions cannot be answered by text alone but require information…

Semantic parsing is the problem of deriving machine interpretable meaning representations from natural language utterances. Neural models with encoder-decoder architectures have recently achieved substantial improvements over traditional…