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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…

Retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) must ensure that retrieved passages are not only individually relevant but also collectively form a comprehensive set. Existing approaches primarily rerank top-k passages based on their…

Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent…

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval researches. For decades, the lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but solely using this signal in retrieval may cause the vocabulary…

Dense retrieval systems have been widely used in various NLP applications. However, their vulnerabilities to potential attacks have been underexplored. This paper investigates a novel attack scenario where the attackers aim to mislead the…

Medical systematic reviews typically require assessing all the documents retrieved by a search. The reason is two-fold: the task aims for ``total recall''; and documents retrieved using Boolean search are an unordered set, and thus it is…

Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs. Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of…

Dense retrieval has shown promise in the first-stage retrieval process when trained on in-domain labeled datasets. However, previous studies have found that dense retrieval is hard to generalize to unseen domains due to its weak modeling of…

Dense retrievers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various information retrieval tasks, but their robustness against tokenizer poisoning remains underexplored. In this work, we assess the vulnerability of dense retrieval systems…

Recently embedding-based retrieval or dense retrieval have shown state of the art results, compared with traditional sparse or bag-of-words based approaches. This paper introduces a model-agnostic doc-level embedding framework through large…

In a number of information retrieval applications (e.g., patent search, literature review, due diligence, etc.), preventing false negatives is more important than preventing false positives. However, approaches designed to reduce review…

Dense retrieval (DR) converts queries and documents into dense embeddings and measures the similarity between queries and documents in vector space. One of the challenges in DR is the lack of domain-specific training data. While DR models…

The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval…

This is the second year of the TREC Deep Learning Track, with the goal of studying ad hoc ranking in the large training data regime. We again have a document retrieval task and a passage retrieval task, each with hundreds of thousands of…

Existing neural ranking models follow the text matching paradigm, where document-to-query relevance is estimated through predicting the matching score. Drawing from the rich literature of classical generative retrieval models, we introduce…

Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks. Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora, pretrained models can…

Large language model (LLM) based listwise reranking has emerged as the dominant paradigm for achieving state-of-the-art ranking effectiveness in information retrieval. However, its reliance on feeding full passage texts into the LLM…

Long-tail question answering presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to their limited ability to acquire and accurately recall less common knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have shown great…

While dense retrieval models, which embed queries and documents into a shared low-dimensional space, have gained widespread popularity, they were shown to exhibit important theoretical limitations and considerably lag behind traditional…

Information retrieval (IR) for precision medicine (PM) often involves looking for multiple pieces of evidence that characterize a patient case. This typically includes at least the name of a condition and a genetic variation that applies to…