Related papers: Dealing with Typos for BERT-based Passage Retrieva…

BERT-based text ranking models have dramatically advanced the state-of-the-art in ad-hoc retrieval, wherein most models tend to consider individual query-document pairs independently. In the mean time, the importance and usefulness to…

Dense retrieval, as the core component of e-commerce search engines, maps user queries and items into a unified semantic space through pre-trained embedding models to enable large-scale real-time semantic retrieval. Despite the rapid…

Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional approaches such as BM25 and Dense…

Knowledge-intensive tasks, particularly open-domain question answering (ODQA), document reranking, and retrieval-augmented language modeling, require a balance between retrieval accuracy and generative flexibility. Traditional retrieval…

Open-domain question answering can be reformulated as a phrase retrieval problem, without the need for processing documents on-demand during inference (Seo et al., 2019). However, current phrase retrieval models heavily depend on sparse…

This paper describes a compact and effective model for low-latency passage retrieval in conversational search based on learned dense representations. Prior to our work, the state-of-the-art approach uses a multi-stage pipeline comprising…

Pre-trained language model (PTM) has been shown to yield powerful text representations for dense passage retrieval task. The Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is a major sub-task of the pre-training process. However, we found that the…

Beyond topical relevance, passage ranking for open-domain factoid question answering also requires a passage to contain an answer (answerability). While a few recent studies have incorporated some reading capability into a ranker to account…

Recently, pre-trained models have been the dominant paradigm in natural language processing. They achieved remarkable state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of related tasks, such as textual entailment, natural language inference,…

Humour-aware information retrieval poses unique challenges beyond standard semantic retrieval, as systems must account not only for topical relevance but also for humour-specific linguistic phenomena such as wordplay, phonetic ambiguity,…

Relevance feedback techniques assume that users provide relevance judgments for the top k (usually 10) documents and then re-rank using a new query model based on those judgments. Even though this is effective, there has been little…

In precision-oriented tasks like answer ranking, it is more important to rank many relevant answers highly than to retrieve all relevant answers. It follows that a good ranking strategy would be to learn how to identify the easiest correct…

Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in the use of deep learning to solve various natural language processing (NLP) problems. Early deep learning models were constrained by their sequential or unidirectional nature, such that…

Domain adaptation or transfer learning using pre-trained language models such as BERT has proven to be an effective approach for many natural language processing tasks. In this work, we propose to formulate word sense disambiguation as a…

Built upon the existing analysis of retrieval heads in large language models, we propose an alternative reranking framework that trains models to estimate passage-query relevance using the attention scores of selected heads. This approach…

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…

Speech-based open-domain question answering (QA over a large corpus of text passages with spoken questions) has emerged as an important task due to the increasing number of users interacting with QA systems via speech interfaces. Passage…

We propose several small modifications to Duet---a deep neural ranking model---and evaluate the updated model on the MS MARCO passage ranking task. We report significant improvements from the proposed changes based on an ablation study.

Supervised ranking methods based on bi-encoder or cross-encoder architectures have shown success in multi-stage text ranking tasks, but they require large amounts of relevance judgments as training data. In this work, we propose Listwise…

We study the use of BERT for non-factoid question-answering, focusing on the passage re-ranking task under varying passage lengths. To this end, we explore the fine-tuning of BERT in different learning-to-rank setups, comprising both…