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Deep recommender systems (DRS) are intensively applied in modern web services. To deal with the massive web contents, DRS employs a two-stage workflow: retrieval and ranking, to generate its recommendation results. The retriever aims to…

Deep learning for Information Retrieval (IR) requires a large amount of high-quality query-document relevance labels, but such labels are inherently sparse. Label smoothing redistributes some observed probability mass over unobserved…

Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…

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…

Deep search agents have proven effective in enhancing LLMs by retrieving external knowledge during multi-step reasoning. However, existing methods often generate a single query for retrieval at each reasoning step, limiting information…

Pre-trained deep language models~(LM) have advanced the state-of-the-art of text retrieval. Rerankers fine-tuned from deep LM estimates candidate relevance based on rich contextualized matching signals. Meanwhile, deep LMs can also be…

Generative retrieval models encode pointers to information in a corpus as an index within the model's parameters. These models serve as part of a larger pipeline, where retrieved information conditions generation for knowledge-intensive NLP…

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…

This paper introduces our proposed system for the MIA Shared Task on Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering (COQA). In this challenging scenario, given an input question the system has to gather evidence documents from a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of information retrieval, particularly for reranking. Listwise LLM rerankers have showcased superior performance and generalizability compared to existing supervised…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong promise as rerankers, especially in ``listwise'' settings where an LLM is prompted to rerank several search results at once. However, this ``cascading'' retrieve-and-rerank approach is limited…

Generative information retrieval (GenIR) is a promising neural retrieval paradigm that formulates document retrieval as a document identifier (docid) generation task, allowing for end-to-end optimization toward a unified global retrieval…

State-of-the-art Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models for Open-domain Question Answering (QA) are typically trained for span selection using distantly supervised positive examples and heuristically retrieved negative examples. This…

Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and…

Modern knowledge-intensive systems, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), rely on effective retrievers to establish the performance ceiling for downstream modules. However, retriever training has been bottlenecked by sparse,…

In this paper, we present our approaches for the case law retrieval and the legal case entailment task in the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) 2021. As first stage retrieval methods combined with neural…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems critically depend on retrieval quality, yet no systematic comparison of modern retrieval methods exists for heterogeneous documents containing both text and tabular data. We benchmark ten…

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…

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…

Advances in large language models (LLMs) significantly enhance reasoning capabilities but their deployment is restricted in resource-constrained scenarios. Knowledge distillation addresses this by transferring knowledge from powerful…