Related papers: NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retri…
In recent years, conversational agents have provided a natural and convenient access to useful information in people's daily life, along with a broad and new research topic, conversational question answering (QA). Among the popular…
Question answering (QA) systems for large document collections typically use pipelines that (i) retrieve possibly relevant documents, (ii) re-rank them, (iii) rank paragraphs or other snippets of the top-ranked documents, and (iv) select…
Conversational search seeks to retrieve relevant passages for the given questions in conversational question answering. Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) improves conversational search by refining the original queries into…
Conversational search is an emerging topic in the information retrieval community. One of the major challenges to multi-turn conversational search is to model the conversation history to answer the current question. Existing methods either…
Conversational search aims to satisfy users' complex information needs via multiple-turn interactions. The key challenge lies in revealing real users' search intent from the context-dependent queries. Previous studies achieve conversational…
In multi-turn dialog, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences \cite{Carbonell1983DiscoursePA}, which naturally makes understanding the dialog context more difficult. However, it is essential to fully grasp the dialog…
This paper describes a compact and effective model for low-latency passage retrieval in conversational search based on learned dense representations. Prior to our work, the state-of-the-art approach uses a multi-stage pipeline comprising…
Conversational machine comprehension requires the understanding of the conversation history, such as previous question/answer pairs, the document context, and the current question. To enable traditional, single-turn models to encode the…
We develop a unified system to answer directly from text open-domain questions that may require a varying number of retrieval steps. We employ a single multi-task transformer model to perform all the necessary subtasks -- retrieving…
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…
Evaluating conversational systems in multi-turn settings remains a fundamental challenge. Conventional pipelines typically rely on manually defined rubrics and fixed conversational context$-$a static approach that limits coverage and fails…
Open-domain long-term memory conversation can establish long-term intimacy with humans, and the key is the ability to understand and memorize long-term dialogue history information. Existing works integrate multiple models for modelling…
Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) systems have emerged as a pivotal area within Natural Language Processing (NLP) by driving advancements that enable machines to engage in dynamic and context-aware conversations. These capabilities…
In the last few years, open-domain question answering (ODQA) has advanced rapidly due to the development of deep learning techniques and the availability of large-scale QA datasets. However, the current datasets are essentially designed for…
Large language models have recently pushed open domain question answering (ODQA) to new frontiers. However, prevailing retriever-reader pipelines often depend on multiple rounds of prompt level instructions, leading to high computational…
The rapid advancement of conversational search systems revolutionizes how information is accessed by enabling the multi-turn interaction between the user and the system. Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two…
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with information retrieval capabilities (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)) has proven beneficial for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, understanding users' contextual search intent when…
Reading comprehension models answer questions posed in natural language when provided with a short passage of text. They present an opportunity to address a long-standing challenge in data management: the extraction of structured data from…
Transformers are not suited for processing long documents, due to their quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. Simply truncating a long document or applying the sparse attention mechanism will incur the context fragmentation…
Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more…