Related papers: Zero-shot Query Contextualization for Conversation…
As a cornerstone of modern information access, search engines have become indispensable in everyday life. With the rapid advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs),…
In real-world environments, AI systems often face unfamiliar scenarios without labeled data, creating a major challenge for conventional scene understanding models. The inability to generalize across unseen contexts limits the deployment of…
The search of information in large text repositories has been plagued by the so-called document-query vocabulary gap, i.e. the semantic discordance between the contents in the stored document entities on the one hand and the human query on…
Dense retrieval (DR) has the potential to resolve the query understanding challenge in conversational search by matching in the learned embedding space. However, this adaptation is challenging due to DR models' extra needs for supervision…
The open-set text recognition task is an emerging challenge that requires an extra capability to cognize novel characters during evaluation. We argue that a major cause of the limited performance for current methods is the confounding…
In long-context question answering, selecting the appropriate scope of context for a query remains a key and unresolved challenge. Insufficient context can lead to missing essential information, whereas excessive context often introduces…
Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks. Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora, pretrained models can…
Conversational search provides a more convenient interface for users to search by allowing multi-turn interaction with the search engine. However, the effectiveness of the conversational dense retrieval methods is limited by the scarcity of…
A heightened interest in the presence of the past has given rise to the new field of memory studies, but there is a lack of search and research tools to support studying how and why the past is evoked in diachronic discourses. Searching for…
Reading a document and extracting an answer to a question about its content has attracted substantial attention recently. While most work has focused on the interaction between the question and the document, in this work we evaluate the…
Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more…
Language model users often issue queries that lack specification, where the context under which a query was issued -- such as the user's identity, the query's intent, and the criteria for a response to be useful -- is not explicit. For…
In this paper, we present empirical studies on conversational recommendation tasks using representative large language models in a zero-shot setting with three primary contributions. (1) Data: To gain insights into model behavior in…
Contextual biasing refers to the problem of biasing the automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems towards rare entities that are relevant to the specific user or application scenarios. We propose algorithms for contextual biasing based on…
This paper addresses the gap between general-purpose text embeddings and the specific demands of item retrieval tasks. We demonstrate the shortcomings of existing models in capturing the nuances necessary for zero-shot performance on item…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
Modern day applications, especially information retrieval webapps that involve "search" as their use cases are gradually moving towards "answering" modules. Conversational chatbots which have been proved to be more engaging to users, use…
Linear embedding transformation has been shown to be effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks and achieve surprisingly promising results. However, cross-lingual embedding space mapping is usually studied in static word-level…
Conversational question answering systems often rely on semantic parsing to enable interactive information retrieval, which involves the generation of structured database queries from a natural language input. For information-seeking…
How to leverage dynamic contextual information in end-to-end speech recognition has remained an active research area. Previous solutions to this problem were either designed for specialized use cases that did not generalize well to…