Related papers: Two-Step Question Retrieval for Open-Domain QA
Evidence retrieval is a critical stage of question answering (QA), necessary not only to improve performance, but also to explain the decisions of the corresponding QA method. We introduce a simple, fast, and unsupervised iterative evidence…
E-commerce recommendation and search commonly rely on sparse keyword matching (e.g., BM25), which breaks down under vocabulary mismatch when user intent has limited lexical overlap with product metadata. We cast content-based recommendation…
Phase retrieval, a nonlinear problem prevalent in imaging applications, has been extensively studied using random models, some of which with i.i.d. sensing matrix components. While these models offer robust reconstruction guarantees, they…
Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers…
Answering complex open-domain questions requires understanding the latent relations between involving entities. However, we found that the existing QA datasets are extremely imbalanced in some types of relations, which hurts the…
Recent developments of dense retrieval rely on quality representations of queries and contexts from pre-trained query and context encoders. In this paper, we introduce TOUR (Test-Time Optimization of Query Representations), which further…
Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems necessitate a reader model capable of generating answers by simultaneously referring to multiple passages. Although representative models like Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) have been proposed to…
Long-context multiple-choice question answering tasks require robust reasoning over extensive text sources. Since most of the pre-trained transformer models are restricted to processing only a few hundred words at a time, successful…
Most existing approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA) answer questions directly, however, people usually decompose a complex question into a sequence of simple sub questions and finally obtain the answer to the original question after…
We study open-domain question answering with structured, unstructured and semi-structured knowledge sources, including text, tables, lists and knowledge bases. Departing from prior work, we propose a unifying approach that homogenizes all…
Efficient knowledge retrieval plays a pivotal role in ensuring the success of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems by facilitating the selection of relevant information necessary to fulfill user requests. However, current approaches…
Prompting-based large language models (LLMs) are surprisingly powerful at generating natural language reasoning steps or Chains-of-Thoughts (CoT) for multi-step question answering (QA). They struggle, however, when the necessary knowledge…
Dense retrieval (DR) approaches based on powerful pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieved significant advances and have become a key component for modern open-domain question-answering systems. However, they require large amounts of…
Dual-encoder-based dense retrieval models have become the standard in IR. They employ large Transformer-based language models, which are notoriously inefficient in terms of resources and latency. We propose Fast-Forward indexes -- vector…
Parallel Speculative Decoding (PSD) accelerates traditional Speculative Decoding (SD) by overlapping draft generation with verification. However, it remains hampered by two fundamental challenges: (1) a theoretical speedup ceiling dictated…
The task of information retrieval is an important component of many natural language processing systems, such as open domain question answering. While traditional methods were based on hand-crafted features, continuous representations based…
Generative retrieval is a promising new neural retrieval paradigm that aims to optimize the retrieval pipeline by performing both indexing and retrieval with a single transformer model. However, this new paradigm faces challenges with…
In spoken conversational question answering (SCQA), the answer to the corresponding question is generated by retrieving and then analyzing a fixed spoken document, including multi-part conversations. Most SCQA systems have considered only…
Question answering (QA) systems for large document collections typically use pipelines that (i) retrieve possibly relevant documents, (ii) re-rank them, (iii) rank paragraphs or other snippets of the top-ranked documents, and (iv) select…
Video question answering that requires external knowledge beyond the visual content remains a significant challenge in AI systems. While models can effectively answer questions based on direct visual observations, they often falter when…