Related papers: ZeQR: Zero-shot Query Reformulation for Conversati…
Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing…
While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are suitable to train…
We propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open question answering. The re-ranker re-scores retrieved passages with a zero-shot question generation model, which uses a pre-trained language model…
Conversational search is one of the ultimate goals of information retrieval. Recent research approaches conversational search by simplified settings of response ranking and conversational question answering, where an answer is either…
The dependency between an adequate question formulation and correct answer selection is a very intriguing but still underexplored area. In this paper, we show that question rewriting (QR) of the conversational context allows to shed more…
Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…
Performing automatic reformulations of a user's query is a popular paradigm used in information retrieval (IR) for improving effectiveness -- as exemplified by the pseudo-relevance feedback approaches, which expand the query in order to…
Spoken Question Answering (QA) is a key feature of voice assistants, usually backed by multiple QA systems. Users ask questions via spontaneous speech which can contain disfluencies, errors, and informal syntax or phrasing. This is a major…
Quantization is a promising approach for reducing the inference time and memory footprint of neural networks. However, most existing quantization methods require access to the original training dataset for retraining during quantization.…
Zero-shot text learning enables text classifiers to handle unseen classes efficiently, alleviating the need for task-specific training data. A simple approach often relies on comparing embeddings of query (text) to those of potential…
Generative query rewrite generates reconstructed query rewrites using the conversation history while rely heavily on gold rewrite pairs that are expensive to obtain. Recently, few-shot learning is gaining increasing popularity for this…
Questions asked by humans during a conversation often contain contextual dependencies, i.e., explicit or implicit references to previous dialogue turns. These dependencies take the form of coreferences (e.g., via pronoun use) or ellipses,…
Zero-shot intent classification is a vital and challenging task in dialogue systems, which aims to deal with numerous fast-emerging unacquainted intents without annotated training data. To obtain more satisfactory performance, the crucial…
Finetuning pretrained models on downstream generation tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting in zero-shot conditions. In this work, we focus on summarization and tackle the problem through the lens of language-independent…
Generative retrieval (GR) reformulates information retrieval (IR) by framing it as the generation of document identifiers (docids), thereby enabling end-to-end optimization and seamless integration with generative language models (LMs).…
Effective information searching is essential for enhancing the reasoning and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has explored using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve LLMs' search capabilities by…
Clarification need prediction (CNP) is a key task in conversational search, aiming to predict whether to ask a clarifying question or give an answer to the current user query. However, current research on CNP suffers from the issues of…
Given a query and a document corpus, the information retrieval (IR) task is to output a ranked list of relevant documents. Combining large language models (LLMs) with embedding-based retrieval models, recent work shows promising results on…
We equip a smaller Language Model to generalise to answering challenging compositional questions that have not been seen in training. To do so we propose a combination of multitask supervised pretraining on up to 93 tasks designed to…
We study the problem of zero-shot exercise retrieval in the context of online language learning, to give learners the ability to explicitly request personalized exercises via natural language. Using real-world data collected from language…