Related papers: Towards Proactive Information Retrieval in Noisy T…
A fundamental ability of an intelligent web-based agent is seeking out and acquiring new information. Internet search engines reliably find the correct vicinity but the top results may be a few links away from the desired target. A…
Publications in the life sciences are characterized by a large technical vocabulary, with many lexical and semantic variations for expressing the same concept. Towards addressing the problem of relevance in biomedical literature search, we…
Chat-oriented dialogue systems designed to provide tangible benefits, such as sharing the latest news or preventing frailty in senior citizens, often require Proactive acquisition of specific user Information via chats on user-faVOred…
We test the hypothesis that the extent to which one obtains information on a given topic through Wikipedia depends on the language in which it is consulted. Controlling the size factor, we investigate this hypothesis for a number of 25…
Pairing a lexical retriever with a neural re-ranking model has set state-of-the-art performance on large-scale information retrieval datasets. This pipeline covers scenarios like question answering or navigational queries, however, for…
In an effort to better understand meaning from natural language texts, we explore methods aimed at organizing lexical objects into contexts. A number of these methods for organization fall into a family defined by word ordering. Unlike…
This work describes the theory and the implementation of a new software tool, the "Web Topical Discovery System" (WTDS), which provides an approach to the automatic discovery and selection of new web pages relevant to specific analytical…
The rapidly increasing number of scientific documents available publicly on the Internet creates the challenge of efficiently organizing and indexing these documents. Due to the time consuming and tedious nature of manual classification and…
Existing knowledge-based question answering systems often rely on small annotated training data. While shallow methods like relation extraction are robust to data scarcity, they are less expressive than the deep meaning representation…
Topic modeling is an unsupervised method for revealing the hidden semantic structure of a corpus. It has been increasingly widely adopted as a tool in the social sciences, including political science, digital humanities and sociological…
In this report, we unify two quite distinct approaches to information retrieval: region models and language models. Region models were developed for structured document retrieval. They provide a well-defined behaviour as well as a simple…
This work falls in the areas of information retrieval and semantic web, and aims to improve the evaluation of web search tools. Indeed, the huge number of information on the web as well as the growth of new inexperienced users creates new…
In this technical report we present a database schema used to store Wikipedia so it can be easily used in query-intensive applications. In addition to storing the information in a way that makes it highly accessible, our schema enables…
Existing dense retrieval models struggle with reasoning-intensive retrieval task as they fail to capture implicit relevance that requires reasoning beyond surface-level semantic information. To address these challenges, we propose…
Knowledge retrieval is one of the major challenges in building a knowledge-grounded dialogue system. A common method is to use a neural retriever with a distributed approximate nearest-neighbor database to quickly find the relevant…
Hyperlinks and other relations in Wikipedia are a extraordinary resource which is still not fully understood. In this paper we study the different types of links in Wikipedia, and contrast the use of the full graph with respect to just…
The increasing availability of biological data is improving our understanding of diseases and providing new insight into their underlying relationships. Thanks to the improvements on both text mining techniques and computational capacity,…
Accurately retrieving relevant bid keywords for user queries is critical in Sponsored Search but remains challenging, particularly for short, ambiguous queries. Existing dense and generative retrieval models often fail to capture nuanced…
User-to-item retrieval has been an active research area in recommendation system, and two tower models are widely adopted due to model simplicity and serving efficiency. In this work, we focus on a variant called \textit{conditional…
Contextual information in search sessions is important for capturing users' search intents. Various approaches have been proposed to model user behavior sequences to improve document ranking in a session. Typically, training samples of…