Related papers: Mixed-initiative Query Rewriting in Conversational…
Resolving the contextual dependency is one of the most challenging tasks in the Conversational system. Our submission to CAsT-2021 aimed to preserve the key terms and the context in all subsequent turns and use classical Information…
As demonstrated by GPT-3 and T5, transformers grow in capability as parameter spaces become larger and larger. However, for tasks that require a large amount of knowledge, non-parametric memory allows models to grow dramatically with a…
We present ChatR1, a reasoning framework based on reinforcement learning (RL) for conversational question answering (CQA). Reasoning plays an important role in CQA, where user intent evolves across dialogue turns, and utterances are often…
Research on conversational search has so far mostly focused on query rewriting and multi-stage passage retrieval. However, synthesizing the top retrieved passages into a complete, relevant, and concise response is still an open challenge.…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which offers step-by-step problem-solving rationales, has impressively unlocked the reasoning potential of large language models (LLMs). Yet, the standard CoT is less effective in problems demanding…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular approach to steering the output of a large language model (LLM) by incorporating retrieved contexts as inputs. However, existing work observed the generator bias, such that…
Multimodal document retrieval systems enable information access across text, images, and layouts, benefiting various domains like document-based question answering, report analysis, and interactive content summarization. Rerankers improve…
We present a novel approach to dialogue state tracking and referring expression resolution tasks. Successful contextual understanding of multi-turn spoken dialogues requires resolving referring expressions across turns and tracking the…
Providing voice assistants the ability to navigate multi-turn conversations is a challenging problem. Handling multi-turn interactions requires the system to understand various conversational use-cases, such as steering, intent carryover,…
Multi-stage ranking pipelines have been a practical solution in modern search systems, where the first-stage retrieval is to return a subset of candidate documents, and latter stages attempt to re-rank those candidates. Unlike re-ranking…
The Recherche Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique (RALI) team participated in the 2024 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance (iKAT) Track. In personalized conversational search, effectively capturing a user's complex search intent…
With the rapid development of large-scale language models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been widely adopted. However, existing RAG paradigms are inevitably influenced by erroneous retrieval information, thereby reducing the…
Recent progress in deep learning has continuously improved the accuracy of dialogue response selection. In particular, sophisticated neural network architectures are leveraged to capture the rich interactions between dialogue context and…
How would you search for a unique, fashionable shoe that a friend wore and you want to buy, but you didn't take a picture? Existing approaches propose interactive image search as a promising venue. However, they either entrust the user with…
In this work we focus on multi-turn passage retrieval as a crucial component of conversational search. One of the key challenges in multi-turn passage retrieval comes from the fact that the current turn query is often underspecified due to…
Large reasoning models exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities via long, elaborate reasoning trajectories. Supervised fine-tuning on such reasoning traces, also known as distillation, can be a cost-effective way to boost reasoning…
Retrieval-augmented generation have become central in natural language processing due to their efficacy in generating factual content. While traditional methods employ single-time retrieval, more recent approaches have shifted towards…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, but is widely believed to offer limited benefit for reasoning-intensive problems such as math and code generation. We challenge this assumption by…
Vocabulary mismatch is a central problem in information retrieval (IR), i.e., the relevant documents may not contain the same (symbolic) terms of the query. Recently, neural representations have shown great success in capturing semantic…
Passage retrieval and ranking is a key task in open-domain question answering and information retrieval. Current effective approaches mostly rely on pre-trained deep language model-based retrievers and rankers. These methods have been shown…