Related papers: Towards Self-Contained Answers: Entity-Based Answe…
Conversational interfaces provide a flexible and easy way for users to seek information that may otherwise be difficult or inconvenient to obtain. However, existing interfaces generally fall into one of two categories: FAQs, where users…
Current neural re-rankers often struggle with complex information needs and long, content-rich documents. The fundamental issue is not computational--it is intelligent content selection: identifying what matters in lengthy, multi-faceted…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…
Having an intelligent dialogue agent that can engage in conversational question answering (ConvQA) is now no longer limited to Sci-Fi movies only and has, in fact, turned into a reality. These intelligent agents are required to understand…
Understanding searchers' queries is an essential component of semantic search systems. In many cases, search queries involve specific attributes of an entity in a knowledge base (KB), which can be further used to find query answers. In this…
Most of the Natural Language Processing systems are involved in entity-based processing for several tasks like Information Extraction, Question-Answering, Text-Summarization and so on. A new challenge comes when entities play roles…
Recent research on conversational search highlights the importance of mixed-initiative in conversations. To enable mixed-initiative, the system should be able to ask clarifying questions to the user. However, the ability of the underlying…
Recently, a new paradigm called Differentiable Search Index (DSI) has been proposed for document retrieval, wherein a sequence-to-sequence model is learned to directly map queries to relevant document identifiers. The key idea behind DSI is…
Google and other search engines feature the entity search by representing a knowledge card summarizing related facts about the user-supplied entity. However, the knowledge card is limited to certain entities that have a Wiki page or an…
Entity retrieval is the task of finding entities such as people or products in response to a query, based solely on the textual documents they are associated with. Recent semantic entity retrieval algorithms represent queries and experts in…
Entity Recognition (ER) within a text is a fundamental exercise in Natural Language Processing, enabling further depending tasks such as Knowledge Extraction, Text Summarisation, or Keyphrase Extraction. An entity consists of single words…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
The dependency between an adequate question formulation and correct answer selection is a very intriguing but still underexplored area. In this paper, we show that question rewriting (QR) of the conversational context allows to shed more…
Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) is a relatively new research area within conversational AI that attempts to seek information from end-users in order to understand and satisfy users' needs. If realized, such a system has…
When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs…
Semantic annotation, the process of identifying key-phrases in texts and linking them to concepts in a knowledge base, is an important basis for semantic information retrieval and the Semantic Web uptake. Despite the emergence of semantic…
In conversational search systems, a key component is to determine and clarify the intent behind complex queries. We view intent clarification in light of the exploratory search paradigm, where users, through an iterative, evolving process…
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,…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
Entities are at the center of how we represent and aggregate knowledge. For instance, Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are structured by entities (e.g., one per Wikipedia article). The ability to retrieve such entities given a query is…