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

In this study, we tackle the challenge of inadequate and costly training data that has hindered the development of conversational question answering (ConvQA) systems. Enterprises have a large corpus of diverse internal documents. Instead of…

Recent studies on open-domain question answering have achieved prominent performance improvement using pre-trained language models such as BERT. State-of-the-art approaches typically follow the "retrieve and read" pipeline and employ…

One key feature of dense passage retrievers (DPR) is the use of separate question and passage encoder in a bi-encoder design. Previous work on generalization of DPR mainly focus on testing both encoders in tandem on out-of-distribution…

Recent dense retrievers increasingly leverage the robust text understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encoding queries and documents into a shared embedding space for effective retrieval. However, most existing methods…

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate…

In recent years researchers have achieved considerable success applying neural network methods to question answering (QA). These approaches have achieved state of the art results in simplified closed-domain settings such as the SQuAD…

Retrieving procedure-oriented evidence from materials science papers is difficult because key synthesis details are often scattered across long, context-heavy documents and are not well captured by paragraph-only dense retrieval. We present…

Certain strong LLMs have shown promise for zero-shot formal planning by generating planning languages like PDDL. Yet, the performance of most open-source models under 50B parameters has been reported to be close to zero due to the…

Dense retrieval methods have shown great promise over sparse retrieval methods in a range of NLP problems. Among them, dense phrase retrieval-the most fine-grained retrieval unit-is appealing because phrases can be directly used as the…

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…

Deep prompt tuning (DPT) has gained great success in most natural language processing~(NLP) tasks. However, it is not well-investigated in dense retrieval where fine-tuning~(FT) still dominates. When deploying multiple retrieval tasks using…

Open-domain Question Answering models which directly leverage question-answer (QA) pairs, such as closed-book QA (CBQA) models and QA-pair retrievers, show promise in terms of speed and memory compared to conventional models which retrieve…

Recent studies on Question Answering (QA) and Conversational QA (ConvQA) emphasize the role of retrieval: a system first retrieves evidence from a large collection and then extracts answers. This open-retrieval ConvQA setting typically…

Current Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) model paradigm often contains a retrieving module and a reading module. Given an input question, the reading module predicts the answer from the relevant passages which are retrieved by the…

Many discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks have large label spaces. Learning such a process of large-space decision making is particularly challenging due to the lack of training instances per label and the difficulty of…

Question answering (QA) is a critical task for speech-based retrieval from knowledge sources, by sifting only the answers without requiring to read supporting documents. Specifically, open-domain QA aims to answer user questions on…

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and…

This work presents a novel pipeline that demonstrates what is achievable with a combined effort of state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, it proposes the novel R2-D2 (Rank twice, reaD twice) pipeline composed of retriever, passage…

This paper considers the reading comprehension task in which multiple documents are given as input. Prior work has shown that a pipeline of retriever, reader, and reranker can improve the overall performance. However, the pipeline system is…

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…