Related papers: Explain like I am BM25: Interpreting a Dense Model…

Recently, information retrieval has seen the emergence of dense retrievers, using neural networks, as an alternative to classical sparse methods based on term-frequency. These models have obtained state-of-the-art results on datasets and…

Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR) seeks any-to-any search across text and vision, yet modern embedding models remain brittle when queries require latent reasoning (e.g., resolving underspecified references or matching compositional…

Generative Retrieval (GR), autoregressively decoding relevant document identifiers given a query, has been shown to perform well under the setting of small-scale corpora. By memorizing the document corpus with model parameters, GR…

We study the utility of the lexical translation model (IBM Model 1) for English text retrieval, in particular, its neural variants that are trained end-to-end. We use the neural Model1 as an aggregator layer applied to context-free or…

As an alternative to question answering methods based on feature engineering, deep learning approaches such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory Models (LSTMs) have recently been proposed for semantic matching…

The nuclear norm minimization (NNM) is commonly used to approximate the matrix rank by shrinking all singular values equally. However, the singular values have clear physical meanings in many practical problems, and NNM may not be able to…

Interpretability research often adopts a neuron-centric lens, treating individual neurons as the fundamental units of explanation. However, neuron-level explanations can be undermined by superposition, where single units respond to mixtures…

Dense retrieval methods have shown great promise over sparse retrieval methods in a range of NLP problems. Among them, dense phrase retrieval-the most fine-grained retrieval unit-is appealing because phrases can be directly used as the…

Distributional models provide a convenient way to model semantics using dense embedding spaces derived from unsupervised learning algorithms. However, the dimensions of dense embedding spaces are not designed to resemble human semantic…

Learning from a real-world data stream and continuously updating the model without explicit supervision is a new challenge for NLP applications with machine learning components. In this work, we have developed an adaptive learning system…

Machine learning (ML) model explainability has received growing attention, especially in the area related to model risk and regulations. In this paper, we reviewed and compared some popular ML model explainability methodologies, especially…

Advances in machine reading comprehension (MRC) rely heavily on the collection of large scale human-annotated examples in the form of (question, paragraph, answer) triples. In contrast, humans are typically able to generalize with only a…

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,…

In this paper, we investigate the tendency of end-to-end neural Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models to match shallow patterns rather than perform inference-oriented reasoning on RC benchmarks. We aim to test the ability of these…

Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities…

As the first step in automated natural language processing, representing words and sentences is of central importance and has attracted significant research attention. Different approaches, from the early one-hot and bag-of-words…

Recently, the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs), such as DeepSeek-R1, have seen significant advancements through the slow thinking process. Despite these achievements, the substantial computational demands of LRMs…

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…

Learned sparse text embeddings have gained popularity due to their effectiveness in top-k retrieval and inherent interpretability. Their distributional idiosyncrasies, however, have long hindered their use in real-world retrieval systems.…

This report presents our participation to the WSDM Cup 2026 shared task on multilingual document retrieval from English queries. The task provides a challenging benchmark for cross-lingual generalization. It also provides a natural testbed…