Related papers: Generative and Pseudo-Relevant Feedback for Sparse…

Pseudo-relevance feedback mechanisms, from Rocchio to the relevance models, have shown the usefulness of expanding and reweighting the users' initial queries using information occurring in an initial set of retrieved documents, known as the…

Most research on pseudo relevance feedback (PRF) has been done in vector space and probabilistic retrieval models. This paper shows that Transformer-based rerankers can also benefit from the extra context that PRF provides. It presents PGT,…

Query categorization is an essential part of query intent understanding in e-commerce search. A common query categorization task is to select the relevant fine-grained product categories in a product taxonomy. For frequent queries, rich…

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable intuitive visual search using natural language queries. However, improving their performance often requires fine-tuning and scaling to larger model variants. In this work, we propose a mechanism…

Current pre-trained language model approaches to information retrieval can be broadly divided into two categories: sparse retrievers (to which belong also non-neural approaches such as bag-of-words methods, e.g., BM25) and dense retrievers.…

Deep NLP models have been shown to learn spurious correlations, leaving them brittle to input perturbations. Recent work has shown that counterfactual or contrastive data -- i.e. minimally perturbed inputs -- can reveal these weaknesses,…

In microblog retrieval, query expansion can be essential to obtain good search results due to the short size of queries and posts. Since information in microblogs is highly dynamic, an up-to-date index coupled with pseudo-relevance feedback…

Low-dimensional word vectors have long been used in a wide range of applications in natural language processing. In this paper we shed light on estimating query vectors in ad-hoc retrieval where a limited information is available in the…

Query Expansion using Pseudo Relevance Feedback is a useful and a popular technique for reformulating the query. In our proposed query expansion method, we assume that relevant information can be found within a document near the central…

Query expansion has been employed for a long time to improve the accuracy of query retrievers. Earlier works relied on pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) techniques, which augment a query with terms extracted from documents retrieved in a…

Intuitively, an ideal collaborative filtering (CF) model should learn from users' full rankings over all items to make optimal top-K recommendations. Due to the absence of such full rankings in practice, most CF models rely on pairwise loss…

As more and more search traffic comes from mobile phones, intelligent assistants, and smart-home devices, new challenges (e.g., limited presentation space) and opportunities come up in information retrieval. Previously, an effective…

In a number of information retrieval applications (e.g., patent search, literature review, due diligence, etc.), preventing false negatives is more important than preventing false positives. However, approaches designed to reduce review…

Dense passage retrieval (DPR) is the first step in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLM). DPR fine-tunes pre-trained networks to enhance the alignment of the…

Pre-ranking is a critical stage in industrial recommendation systems, tasked with efficiently scoring thousands of recalled items for downstream ranking. A key challenge is the train-serving discrepancy: pre-ranking models are trained only…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a cost-effective approach to injecting real-time knowledge into large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, constructing and validating high-quality knowledge repositories require considerable…

Relevance feedback techniques assume that users provide relevance judgments for the top k (usually 10) documents and then re-rank using a new query model based on those judgments. Even though this is effective, there has been little…

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has exhibited promise in utilizing external knowledge, its generation process heavily depends on the quality and accuracy of the retrieved context. Large language models (LLMs) struggle to evaluate…

While dense retrieval models, which embed queries and documents into a shared low-dimensional space, have gained widespread popularity, they were shown to exhibit important theoretical limitations and considerably lag behind traditional…

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potential for teaching agents to perform the target tasks without a costly, pre-defined reward function by learning the reward with a supervisor's preference between the two agent…