Related papers: Strong and Efficient Baselines for Open Domain Con…

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their advancements, are fundamentally limited by their static parametric knowledge, hindering performance on tasks requiring open-domain up-to-date information. While enabling LLMs to interact with…

Large Language Model (LLM)-based passage expansion has shown promise for enhancing first-stage retrieval, but often underperforms with dense retrievers due to semantic drift and misalignment with their pretrained semantic space. Beyond…

Despite their recent popularity and well-known advantages, dense retrievers still lag behind sparse methods such as BM25 in their ability to reliably match salient phrases and rare entities in the query and to generalize to out-of-domain…

Conversational Question Answering is a challenging task since it requires understanding of conversational history. In this project, we propose a new system RoBERTa + AT +KD, which involves rationale tagging multi-task, adversarial training,…

Transformer-based models have advanced the field of question answering, but multi-hop reasoning, where answers require combining evidence across multiple passages, remains difficult. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of…

We describe our two-stage system for the Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. The first stage consists of multilingual passage retrieval with a hybrid dense and sparse…

The state of the art in open-domain question answering (QA) relies on an efficient retriever that drastically reduces the search space for the expensive reader. A rather overlooked question in the community is the relationship between the…

In table-text open-domain question answering, a retriever system retrieves relevant evidence from tables and text to answer questions. Previous studies in table-text open-domain question answering have two common challenges: firstly, their…

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have achieved promising performance by leveraging sophisticated natural language understanding and natural language generation capabilities of pre-trained models. This work enables the TOD…

In the chemical and process industries, Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs) and Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) are critical for design, construction, and maintenance. Recent advancements in Generative AI, such as Large Multimodal…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising method for addressing some of the memory-related challenges associated with Large Language Models (LLMs). Two separate systems form the RAG pipeline, the retriever and the reader, and the…

This paper reports on an effort of reproducing the organizers' baseline as well as the top performing participant submission at the 2021 edition of the TREC Conversational Assistance track. TREC systems are commonly regarded as reference…

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval research. For decades, lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but it also has inherent defects, such as the vocabulary mismatch problem.…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent technique for fine-tuning large foundation models. Despite its successes, the substantial parameter redundancy, which limits the capacity and efficiency of LoRA, has been recognized as a…

An essential task of most Question Answering (QA) systems is to re-rank the set of answer candidates, i.e., Answer Sentence Selection (A2S). These candidates are typically sentences either extracted from one or more documents preserving…

Recently, several studies reported that dot-product selfattention (SA) may not be indispensable to the state-of-theart Transformer models. Motivated by the fact that dense synthesizer attention (DSA), which dispenses with dot products and…

Conversational search systems require effective handling of context-dependent queries that often contain ambiguity, omission, and coreference. Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) addresses this challenge by transforming these queries…

Open-retrieval question answering systems are generally trained and tested on large datasets in well-established domains. However, low-resource settings such as new and emerging domains would especially benefit from reliable question…

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…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has received much attention for Open-domain question-answering (ODQA) tasks as a means to compensate for the parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). While previous approaches focused on…