Related papers: Zero-shot Query Contextualization for Conversation…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across edge and cloud platforms for real-time question-answering and retrieval-augmented generation. However, processing lengthy contexts in distributed systems incurs high…
Conversational search provides a natural interface for information retrieval (IR). Recent approaches have demonstrated promising results in applying dense retrieval to conversational IR. However, training dense retrievers requires large…
The integration of external personalized context information into document-grounded conversational systems has significant potential business value, but has not been well-studied. Motivated by the concept of personalized context-aware…
Conversational search systems can improve user experience in digital libraries by facilitating a natural and intuitive way to interact with library content. However, most conversational search systems are limited to performing simple tasks…
The crucial role of the evaluation in the development of the information retrieval tools is useful evidence to improve the performance of these tools and the quality of results that they return. However, the classic evaluation approaches…
To tackle the vocabulary problem in conversational systems, previous work has applied unsupervised learning approaches on co-occurring speech and eye gaze during interaction to automatically acquire new words. Although these approaches have…
Extracting individual sentences from a document as evidence or reasoning steps is commonly done in many NLP tasks. However, extracted sentences often lack context necessary to make them understood, e.g., coreference and background…
Query performance prediction (QPP) is a core task in information retrieval. The QPP task is to predict the retrieval quality of a search system for a query without relevance judgments. Research has shown the effectiveness and usefulness of…
Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting…
When pre-trained on large unsupervised textual corpora, language models are able to store and retrieve factual knowledge to some extent, making it possible to use them directly for zero-shot cloze-style question answering. However, storing…
Conversational search has been regarded as the next-generation search paradigm. Constrained by data scarcity, most existing methods distill the well-trained ad-hoc retriever to the conversational retriever. However, these methods, which…
Data users need relevant context and research expertise to effectively search for and identify relevant datasets. Leading data providers, such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), offer standardized…
In many real-world scenarios, the absence of external knowledge source like Wikipedia restricts question answering systems to rely on latent internal knowledge in limited dialogue data. In addition, humans often seek answers by asking…
Conversational search enables multi-turn interactions between users and systems to fulfill users' complex information needs. During this interaction, the system should understand the users' search intent within the conversational context…
In this paper, we study the learning problem in contextual search, which is motivated by applications such as first-price auction, personalized medicine experiments, and feature-based pricing experiments. In particular, for a sequence of…
Simulating user interactions enables a more user-oriented evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems. While user simulations are cost-efficient and reproducible, many approaches often lack fidelity regarding real user behavior. Most…
We address the task of sentence retrieval for open-ended dialogues. The goal is to retrieve sentences from a document corpus that contain information useful for generating the next turn in a given dialogue. Prior work on dialogue-based…
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…
How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…
Conversational query rewriting aims to reformulate a concise conversational query to a fully specified, context-independent query that can be effectively handled by existing information retrieval systems. This paper presents a few-shot…