Related papers: Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conve…
Retrieval augmentation is critical when Language Models (LMs) exploit non-parametric knowledge related to the query through external knowledge bases before reasoning. The retrieved information is incorporated into LMs as context alongside…
Pre-trained language models have been widely exploited to learn dense representations of documents and queries for information retrieval. While previous efforts have primarily focused on improving effectiveness and user satisfaction,…
Frequently asked question (FAQ) retrieval, with the purpose of providing information on frequent questions or concerns, has far-reaching applications in many areas, where a collection of question-answer (Q-A) pairs compiled a priori can be…
Recent research has shown that mixed-initiative conversational search, based on the interaction between users and computers to clarify and improve a query, provides enormous advantages. Nonetheless, incorporating additional information…
Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the…
Conversational dense retrieval has shown to be effective in conversational search. However, a major limitation of conversational dense retrieval is their lack of interpretability, hindering intuitive understanding of model behaviors for…
Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query…
Conversational search enables multi-turn interactions between users and systems to fulfill users' complex information needs. During this interaction, the system should understand the users' search intent within the conversational context…
Phrase-level dense retrieval has shown many appealing characteristics in downstream NLP tasks by leveraging the fine-grained information that phrases offer. In our work, we propose a new task formulation of dense retrieval, cross-lingual…
User queries in real-world retrieval are often non-faithful (noisy, incomplete, or distorted), causing retrievers to fail when key semantics are missing. We formalize this as retrieval under recall noise, where the observed query is drawn…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
As code search is a frequent developer activity in software development practices, improving the performance of code search is a critical task. In the text retrieval based search techniques employed in the code search, the term mismatch…
Context: The effectiveness of data selection approaches in improving the performance of cross project defect prediction(CPDP) has been shown in multiple previous studies. Beside that, replication studies play an important role in the…
Conversation is the natural mode for information exchange in daily life, a spoken conversational interaction for search input and output is a logical format for information seeking. However, the conceptualisation of user-system interactions…
Prior authorization (PA) requires interpretation of complex and fragmented coverage policies, yet existing retrieval-augmented systems rely on static top-$K$ strategies with fixed numbers of retrieved sections. Such fixed retrieval can be…
Despite recent progress on conversational systems, they still do not perform smoothly and coherently when faced with ambiguous requests. When questions are unclear, conversational systems should have the ability to ask clarifying questions,…
Offline evaluation of information retrieval and recommendation has traditionally focused on distilling the quality of a ranking into a scalar metric such as average precision or normalized discounted cumulative gain. We can use this metric…
Passage retrieval is a fundamental task in many information systems, such as web search and question answering, where both efficiency and effectiveness are critical concerns. In recent years, neural retrievers based on pre-trained language…
Recent advances in large language models have enabled the development of viable generative retrieval systems. Instead of a traditional document ranking, generative retrieval systems often directly return a grounded generated text as a…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…