Related papers: Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conve…
This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse advancements across multiple aspects, recent research fails to successfully…
Conversational search aims to satisfy users' complex information needs via multiple-turn interactions. The key challenge lies in revealing real users' search intent from the context-dependent queries. Previous studies achieve conversational…
Leveraging vast and continually updated knowledge from the Internet has been considered an important ability for a dialogue system. Therefore, the dialogue query generation task is proposed for generating search queries from dialogue…
Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the…
Conversational information seeking (CIS) systems aim to model the user's information need within the conversational context and retrieve the relevant information. One major approach to modeling the conversational context aims to rewrite the…
Conversational search provides a more convenient interface for users to search by allowing multi-turn interaction with the search engine. However, the effectiveness of the conversational dense retrieval methods is limited by the scarcity of…
Conversational search systems enable information retrieval via natural language interactions, with the goal of maximizing users' information gain over multiple dialogue turns. The increasing prevalence of conversational interfaces adopting…
We introduce and address the problem of ad hoc table retrieval: answering a keyword query with a ranked list of tables. This task is not only interesting on its own account, but is also being used as a core component in many other…
Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models…
In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive…
As a cornerstone of modern information access, search engines have become indispensable in everyday life. With the rapid advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs),…
While question-like queries are gaining popularity and search engines' users increasingly adopt them, keyphrase search has traditionally been the cornerstone of web search. This query type is also prevalent in specialised search tasks such…
Traditional search engines usually provide identical search results for all users, overlooking individual preferences. To counter this limitation, personalized search has been developed to re-rank results based on user preferences derived…
Conversational question answering (QA) requires the ability to correctly interpret a question in the context of previous conversation turns. We address the conversational QA task by decomposing it into question rewriting and question…
Retrieval augmented language models have recently become the standard for knowledge intensive tasks. Rather than relying purely on latent semantics within the parameters of large neural models, these methods enlist a semi-parametric memory…
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…
Pretrained language models have improved effectiveness on numerous tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval. Recent work has shown that continuing to pretrain a language model with auxiliary objectives before fine-tuning on the retrieval task can…
User-machine interaction is important for spoken content retrieval. For text content retrieval, the user can easily scan through and select on a list of retrieved item. This is impossible for spoken content retrieval, because the retrieved…
Information-seeking conversation systems are increasingly popular in real-world applications, especially for e-commerce companies. To retrieve appropriate responses for users, it is necessary to compute the matching degrees between…
Open domain conversational agents can answer a broad range of targeted queries. However, the sequential nature of interaction with these systems makes knowledge exploration a lengthy task which burdens the user with asking a chain of well…