Related papers: Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conve…
Retrieval-based conversation systems generally tend to highly rank responses that are semantically similar or even identical to the given conversation context. While the system's goal is to find the most appropriate response, rather than…
Question answering (QA) over text passages is a problem of long-standing interest in information retrieval. Recently, the conversational setting has attracted attention, where a user asks a sequence of questions to satisfy her information…
Query-focused summarization (QFS) is a fundamental task in natural language processing with broad applications, including search engines and report generation. However, traditional approaches assume the availability of relevant documents,…
Query expansion is a technique widely used in image search consisting in combining highly ranked images from an original query into an expanded query that is then reissued, generally leading to increased recall and precision. An important…
We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user is seeking…
Recommender systems are software applications that help users to find items of interest in situations of information overload. Current research often assumes a one-shot interaction paradigm, where the users' preferences are estimated based…
Contextual retrieval is a critical technique for today's search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a system designed to tackle some of the…
Traditional statistical retrieval models often treat each document as a whole. In many cases, however, a document is relevant to a query only because a small part of it contain the targeted information. In this work, we propose a neural…
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…
With the growing demand for massive data analysis, many DBMSs have adopted complex underlying query execution mechanisms, including vectorized operators, parallel execution, and dynamic pipeline modifications. However, there remains a lack…
Recent advances on instruction fine-tuning have led to the development of various prompting techniques for large language models, such as explicit reasoning steps. However, the success of techniques depends on various parameters, such as…
Intelligent personal assistant systems with either text-based or voice-based conversational interfaces are becoming increasingly popular around the world. Retrieval-based conversation models have the advantages of returning fluent and…
Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional approaches such as BM25 and Dense…
Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) systems have emerged as a pivotal area within Natural Language Processing (NLP) by driving advancements that enable machines to engage in dynamic and context-aware conversations. These capabilities…
Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains…
Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product…
Dense retrieval has made significant advancements in information retrieval (IR) by achieving high levels of effectiveness while maintaining online efficiency during a single-pass retrieval process. However, the application of pseudo…
Many recent studies have shown the ability of large language models (LLMs) to achieve state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, such as question answering, text summarization, coding, and translation. In some cases, the results…
Query reformulation is a key mechanism to alleviate the linguistic chasm of query in ad-hoc retrieval. Among various solutions, query reduction effectively removes extraneous terms and specifies concise user intent from long queries.…
Context: The advent of Large Language Model-driven tools like ChatGPT offers software engineers an interactive alternative to community question-answering (CQA) platforms like Stack Overflow. While Stack Overflow provides benefits from the…