Related papers: IterCQR: Iterative Conversational Query Reformulat…
As more and more search traffic comes from mobile phones, intelligent assistants, and smart-home devices, new challenges (e.g., limited presentation space) and opportunities come up in information retrieval. Previously, an effective…
In spoken conversational question answering (SCQA), the answer to the corresponding question is generated by retrieving and then analyzing a fixed spoken document, including multi-part conversations. Most SCQA systems have considered only…
Interactive search can provide a better experience by incorporating interaction feedback from the users. This can significantly improve search accuracy as it helps avoid irrelevant information and captures the users' search intents.…
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…
Query expansion aims to mitigate the mismatch between the language used in a query and in a document. However, query expansion methods can suffer from introducing non-relevant information when expanding the query. To bridge this gap,…
Users often formulate their search queries with immature language without well-developed keywords and complete structures. Such queries fail to express their true information needs and raise ambiguity as fragmental language often yield…
Considering the multimodal signals of search items is beneficial for retrieval effectiveness. Especially in web table retrieval (WTR) experiments, accounting for multimodal properties of tables boosts effectiveness. However, it still…
This paper challenges a cross-genre document retrieval task, where the queries are in formal writing and the target documents are in conversational writing. In this task, a query, is a sentence extracted from either a summary or a plot of…
Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point…
Natural language processing has greatly benefited from the introduction of the attention mechanism. However, standard attention models are of limited interpretability for tasks that involve a series of inference steps. We describe an…
The major task of any e-commerce search engine is to retrieve the most relevant inventory items, which best match the user intent reflected in a query. This task is non-trivial due to many reasons, including ambiguous queries, misaligned…
When users initiate search sessions, their queries are often unclear or might lack of context; this resulting in inefficient document ranking. Multiple approaches have been proposed by the Information Retrieval community to add context and…
Despite the recent advancement in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, most retrieval methodologies are often developed for factual retrieval, which assumes query and positive documents are semantically similar. In this paper, we…
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…
Information retrieval systems have traditionally relied on exact term match methods such as BM25 for first-stage retrieval. However, recent advancements in neural network-based techniques have introduced a new method called dense retrieval.…
Frequently, users of an Information Retrieval (IR) system start with an overarching information need (a.k.a., an analytic task) and proceed to define finer-grained queries covering various important aspects (i.e., sub-topics) of that…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in conversational AI agents often experience errors in the form of misrecognitions by automatic speech recognition (ASR) or semantic gaps in natural language understanding (NLU). These errors…
Getting relevant information from search engines has been the heart of research works in information retrieval. Query expansion is a retrieval technique that has been studied and proved to yield positive results in relevance. Users are…
A peculiarity of conversational search systems is that they involve mixed-initiatives such as system-generated query clarifying questions. Evaluating those systems at a large scale on the end task of IR is very challenging, requiring…
Traditional information retrieval (IR) methods excel at textual and semantic matching but struggle in reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks that require multi-hop inference or complex semantic understanding between queries and documents. One…