Related papers: Instant Answering in E-Commerce Buyer-Seller Messa…

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…

Conversational question answering (QA) requires the ability to correctly interpret a question in the context of previous conversation turns. We address the conversational QA task by decomposing it into question rewriting and question…

Textbook Question Answering is a complex task in the intersection of Machine Comprehension and Visual Question Answering that requires reasoning with multimodal information from text and diagrams. For the first time, this paper taps on the…

Clarification resolution plays an important role in various information retrieval tasks such as interactive question answering and conversational search. In such context, the user often formulates their information needs as short and…

Biomedical Question Answering (BQA) has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its promising application prospect. It is a challenging task because the biomedical questions are professional and usually vary widely. Existing…

Query-focused summarization (QFS) is the task of generating a summary in response to a user-written query. Despite its user-oriented nature, there has been limited work in QFS in explicitly considering a user's understanding of a generated…

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…

Sellers in user to user marketplaces can be inundated with questions from potential buyers. Answers are often already available in the product description. We collected a dataset of around 590K such questions and answers from conversations…

Question answering (QA) plays a central role in financial education, yet existing large language model (LLM) approaches often fail to capture the nuanced and specialized reasoning required for financial problem-solving. The financial domain…

Building a question-answering agent currently requires large annotated datasets, which are prohibitively expensive. This paper proposes Schema2QA, an open-source toolkit that can generate a Q&A system from a database schema augmented with a…

Open-domain question answering (QA) is the tasl of identifying answers to natural questions from a large corpus of documents. The typical open-domain QA system starts with information retrieval to select a subset of documents from the…

Conversational query clarification enables users to refine their search queries through interactive dialogue, improving search effectiveness. Traditional approaches rely on text-based clarifying questions, which often fail to capture…

Standard accuracy metrics indicate that modern reading comprehension systems have achieved strong performance in many question answering datasets. However, the extent these systems truly understand language remains unknown, and existing…

In spoken question answering, QA systems are designed to answer questions from contiguous text spans within the related speech transcripts. However, the most natural way that human seek or test their knowledge is via human conversations.…

User simulation has been a cost-effective technique for evaluating conversational recommender systems. However, building a human-like simulator is still an open challenge. In this work, we focus on how users reformulate their utterances…

Query Auto-Completion (QAC) is an ubiquitous feature of modern textual search systems, suggesting possible ways of completing the query being typed by the user. Efficiency is crucial to make the system have a real-time responsiveness when…

Question answering (QA) can only make progress if we know if an answer is correct, but current answer correctness (AC) metrics struggle with verbose, free-form answers from large language models (LLMs). There are two challenges with current…

In today's digital world, seeking answers to health questions on the Internet is a common practice. However, existing question answering (QA) systems often rely on using pre-selected and annotated evidence documents, thus making them…

Recommender systems are one of the most successful applications of machine learning and data science. They are successful in a wide variety of application domains, including e-commerce, media streaming content, email marketing, and…

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires vision-language models to understand images and use external knowledge, especially for rare entities and long-tail facts. Most existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods…