Related papers: When Retriever-Reader Meets Scenario-Based Multipl…

This paper introduces and analyzes a search and retrieval model that adopts key semantic communication principles from retrieval-augmented generation. We specifically present an information-theoretic analysis of a remote document retrieval…

Question-answering (QA) data often encodes essential information in many facets. This paper studies a natural question: Can we get supervision from QA data for other tasks (typically, non-QA ones)? For example, {\em can we use QAMR (Michael…

Question Answering (QA), as a research field, has primarily focused on either knowledge bases (KBs) or free text as a source of knowledge. These two sources have historically shaped the kinds of questions that are asked over these sources,…

Multi-hop question answering (QA) requires systems to iteratively retrieve evidence and reason across multiple hops. While recent RAG and agentic methods report strong results, the underlying retrieval--reasoning \emph{process} is often…

Event extraction (EE) is a crucial information extraction task that aims to extract event information in texts. Most existing methods assume that events appear in sentences without overlaps, which are not applicable to the complicated…

This paper studies joint models for selecting correct answer sentences among the top $k$ provided by answer sentence selection (AS2) modules, which are core components of retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Our work shows that…

We propose a practical instant question answering (QA) system on product pages of ecommerce services, where for each user query, relevant community question answer (CQA) pairs are retrieved. User queries and CQA pairs differ significantly…

The recent growth of web video sharing platforms has increased the demand for systems that can efficiently browse, retrieve and summarize video content. Query-aware multi-video summarization is a promising technique that caters to this…

Combining multiple perceptual inputs and performing combinatorial reasoning in complex scenarios is a sophisticated cognitive function in humans. With advancements in multi-modal large language models, recent benchmarks tend to evaluate…

Prior work in standardized science exams requires support from large text corpus, such as targeted science corpus fromWikipedia or SimpleWikipedia. However, retrieving knowledge from the large corpus is time-consuming and questions embedded…

Supervised Question Answering systems (QA systems) rely on domain-specific human-labeled data for training. Unsupervised QA systems generate their own question-answer training pairs, typically using secondary knowledge sources to achieve…

Conversational passage retrieval is challenging as it often requires the resolution of references to previous utterances and needs to deal with the complexities of natural language, such as coreference and ellipsis. To address these…

The emergence of structured databases for Question Answering (QA) systems has led to developing methods, in which the problem of learning the correct answer efficiently is based on a linking task between the constituents of the question and…

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model (REVEAL) that learns to encode world knowledge into a large-scale memory, and to retrieve from it to answer knowledge-intensive queries. REVEAL consists of…

Comprehensively retrieving diverse documents is crucial to address queries that admit a wide range of valid answers. We introduce retrieve-verify-retrieve (RVR), a multi-round retrieval framework designed to maximize answer coverage.…

Multimodal IE in social media is difficult because a post may attach multiple images that are weakly related, redundant, or even misleading with respect to the text. In this setting, always-on multimodal fusion wastes computation and can…

Many visual scenes contain text that carries crucial information, and it is thus essential to understand text in images for downstream reasoning tasks. For example, a deep water label on a warning sign warns people about the danger in the…

Question answering is one of the most important and difficult applications at the border of information retrieval and natural language processing, especially when we talk about complex science questions which require some form of inference…

Textbook question answering (TQA) is a challenging task in artificial intelligence due to the complex nature of context needed to answer complex questions. Although previous research has improved the task, there are still some limitations…

Despite extensive research on a wide range of question answering (QA) systems, most existing work focuses on answer containment-i.e., assuming that answers can be directly extracted and/or generated from documents in the corpus. However,…