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Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall…

Dense retrieval has shown promising results in many information retrieval (IR) related tasks, whose foundation is high-quality text representation learning for effective search. Some recent studies have shown that autoencoder-based language…

Conversational modeling is an important task in natural language understanding and machine intelligence. Although previous approaches exist, they are often restricted to specific domains (e.g., booking an airline ticket) and require…

Ranking consistently emerges as a primary focus in information retrieval research. Retrieval and ranking models serve as the foundation for numerous applications, including web search, open domain QA, enterprise domain QA, and text-based…

Dense passage retrieval (DPR) is the first step in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLM). DPR fine-tunes pre-trained networks to enhance the alignment of the…

Pre-trained language models have been successful in many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown that models such as BERT are not ``structurally ready'' to aggregate textual information into a [CLS] vector for dense…

Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) involves reasoning across multiple documents to answer complex questions. Dense retrievers typically outperform sparse methods like BM25 by leveraging semantic embeddings; however, they require labeled…

We classify and re-examine some of the current approaches to improve the performance-computes trade-off of language models, including (1) non-causal models (such as masked language models), (2) extension of batch length with efficient…

Phrase-level dense retrieval has shown many appealing characteristics in downstream NLP tasks by leveraging the fine-grained information that phrases offer. In our work, we propose a new task formulation of dense retrieval, cross-lingual…

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) dynamically obtain the user preferences via multi-turn questions and answers. The existing CRS solutions are widely dominated by deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, deep reinforcement…

Contrastive learning has been the dominant approach to training dense retrieval models. In this work, we investigate the impact of ranking context - an often overlooked aspect of learning dense retrieval models. In particular, we examine…

Information retrieval systems are crucial for enabling effective access to large document collections. Recent approaches have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance retrieval performance through query augmentation, but often rely…

Conversational search is one of the ultimate goals of information retrieval. Recent research approaches conversational search by simplified settings of response ranking and conversational question answering, where an answer is either…

Explaining why dense retrievers assign high relevance scores remains challenging because retrieval decisions are made through opaque high-dimensional embeddings. Existing explanations often focus on surface signals, such as lexical matches,…

Recent studies on Question Answering (QA) and Conversational QA (ConvQA) emphasize the role of retrieval: a system first retrieves evidence from a large collection and then extracts answers. This open-retrieval ConvQA setting typically…

While dense retrieval has been shown effective and efficient across tasks and languages, it remains difficult to create effective fully zero-shot dense retrieval systems when no relevance label is available. In this paper, we recognize the…

Neural Encoders are frequently used in the NLP domain to perform dense retrieval tasks, for instance, to generate the candidate documents for a given query in question-answering tasks. However, sparse annotation and label noise in the…

We study the coarse-grained selection module in retrieval-based chatbot. Coarse-grained selection is a basic module in a retrieval-based chatbot, which constructs a rough candidate set from the whole database to speed up the interaction…

Pre-trained code models have emerged as the state-of-the-art paradigm for code search tasks. The paradigm involves pre-training the model on search-irrelevant tasks such as masked language modeling, followed by the fine-tuning stage, which…

In knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (OpenQA), large language models (LLMs) often struggle to generate factual answers, relying solely on their internal (parametric) knowledge. To address this limitation,…