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

Dense retrieval (DR) has the potential to resolve the query understanding challenge in conversational search by matching in the learned embedding space. However, this adaptation is challenging due to DR models' extra needs for supervision…

With the rise of large-scale pre-trained language models, open-domain question-answering (ODQA) has become an important research topic in NLP. Based on the popular pre-training fine-tuning approach, we posit that an additional in-domain…

Dense retrievers powered by pretrained embeddings are widely used for document retrieval but struggle in specialized domains due to the mismatches between the training and target domain distributions. Domain adaptation typically requires…

Interacting with a speech interface to query a Question Answering (QA) system is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, QA systems rely on passage retrieval to select candidate contexts and reading comprehension to extract the final…

Dense retrieval has made significant advancements in information retrieval (IR) by achieving high levels of effectiveness while maintaining online efficiency during a single-pass retrieval process. However, the application of pseudo…

Given its effectiveness on knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks, dense retrieval models have become increasingly popular. Specifically, the de-facto architecture for open-domain question answering uses two isomorphic…

Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) has significantly advanced in addressing the challenges of conversational search, particularly those stemming from the latent user intent and the need for historical context. Recent works aimed to…

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…

Dense passage retrieval (DPR) is the first step in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLM). DPR fine-tunes pre-trained networks to enhance the alignment of the…

Assessing ways in which Language Models can reduce their hallucinations and improve the outputs' quality is crucial to ensure their large-scale use. However, methods such as fine-tuning on domain-specific data or the training of a separate…

To date, most of recent work under the retrieval-reader framework for open-domain QA focuses on either extractive or generative reader exclusively. In this paper, we study a hybrid approach for leveraging the strengths of both models. We…

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…

Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using fine-tuned language models~(LM) for dense retrieval. However, dense retrievers are hard to train, typically requiring heavily engineered fine-tuning pipelines to realize their full…

In this paper, we analyze the capabilities of the multi-lingual Dense Passage Retriever (mDPR) for extremely low-resource languages. In the Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Answer Generation (CORA) pipeline, mDPR achieves success on…

With the rise of long-context language models (LMs) capable of processing tens of thousands of tokens in a single context window, do multi-stage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines still offer measurable benefits over simpler,…

Traditional information retrieval (such as that offered by web search engines) impedes users with information overload from extensive result pages and the need to manually locate the desired information therein. Conversely,…

Domain adaptation has recently become a key problem in dialogue systems research. Deep learning, while being the preferred technique for modeling such systems, works best given massive training data. However, in the real-world scenario,…

Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) is a challenging VQA task that requires retrieval of external knowledge to answer questions about images. Recent OK-VQA systems use Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) to retrieve documents…

Task-oriented semantic parsing is a critical component of virtual assistants, which is responsible for understanding the user's intents (set reminder, play music, etc.). Recent advances in deep learning have enabled several approaches to…

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering (QA) tasks. While incorporating new information with the retrieval of relevant passages is a…