Related papers: Saving Dense Retriever from Shortcut Dependency in…
The goal of screening prioritisation in systematic reviews is to identify relevant documents with high recall and rank them in early positions for review. This saves reviewing effort if paired with a stopping criterion, and speeds up review…
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…
Compared to standard retrieval tasks, passage retrieval for conversational question answering (CQA) poses new challenges in understanding the current user question, as each question needs to be interpreted within the dialogue context.…
Dense retrieval has made significant advancements in information retrieval (IR) by achieving high levels of effectiveness while maintaining online efficiency during a single-pass retrieval process. However, the application of pseudo…
Despite their recent popularity and well-known advantages, dense retrievers still lag behind sparse methods such as BM25 in their ability to reliably match salient phrases and rare entities in the query and to generalize to out-of-domain…
Many text generation systems benefit from using a retriever to retrieve passages from a textual knowledge corpus (e.g., Wikipedia) which are then provided as additional context to the generator. For open-ended generation tasks (like…
In open-domain question answering, dense passage retrieval has become a new paradigm to retrieve relevant passages for finding answers. Typically, the dual-encoder architecture is adopted to learn dense representations of questions and…
Dense retrieval is a basic building block of information retrieval applications. One of the main challenges of dense retrieval in real-world settings is the handling of queries containing misspelled words. A popular approach for handling…
Dense retrieval compresses texts into single embeddings ranked by cosine similarity. While efficient for recall, this interface is brittle for identity-level matching: minimal compositional edits (negation, role swaps) flip meaning yet…
Training dense passage representations via contrastive learning has been shown effective for Open-Domain Passage Retrieval (ODPR). Existing studies focus on further optimizing by improving negative sampling strategy or extra pretraining.…
In this demo we present a web-based application for selecting an effective pre-trained dense retriever to use on a private collection. Our system, DenseQuest, provides unsupervised selection and ranking capabilities to predict the best…
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…
Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific…
Recent research has revealed that deep neural networks often take dataset biases as a shortcut to make decisions rather than understand tasks, leading to failures in real-world applications. In this study, we focus on the spurious…
Effective conversational search demands a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. Users frequently use abbreviations and shift topics in the middle of conversations, posing challenges for conventional retrievers.…
Large language models are meticulously aligned to be both helpful and harmless. However, recent research points to a potential overkill which means models may refuse to answer benign queries. In this paper, we investigate the factors for…
Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering (ODConvQA) aims at answering questions through a multi-turn conversation based on a retriever-reader pipeline, which retrieves passages and then predicts answers with them. However, such a…
Conversational search allows a user to interact with a search system in multiple turns. A query is strongly dependent on the conversation context. An effective way to improve retrieval effectiveness is to expand the current query with…
Current dense text retrieval models face two typical challenges. First, they adopt a siamese dual-encoder architecture to encode queries and documents independently for fast indexing and searching, while neglecting the finer-grained…
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…