Related papers: A Multimodal Dense Retrieval Approach for Speech-B…

Spoken Question Answering (SQA) is essential for machines to reply to user's question by finding the answer span within a given spoken passage. SQA has been previously achieved without ASR to avoid recognition errors and Out-of-Vocabulary…

Interacting with a speech interface to query a Question Answering (QA) system is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, QA systems rely on passage retrieval to select candidate contexts and reading comprehension to extract the final…

One common approach for question answering over speech data is to first transcribe speech using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and then employ text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on the transcriptions. While this cascaded…

Open-domain question answering can be reformulated as a phrase retrieval problem, without the need for processing documents on-demand during inference (Seo et al., 2019). However, current phrase retrieval models heavily depend on sparse…

Open-domain question answering relies on efficient passage retrieval to select candidate contexts, where traditional sparse vector space models, such as TF-IDF or BM25, are the de facto method. In this work, we show that retrieval can be…

Conventional keyword search systems operate on automatic speech recognition (ASR) outputs, which causes them to have a complex indexing and search pipeline. This has led to interest in ASR-free approaches to simplify the search procedure.…

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.…

Dense neural text retrieval has achieved promising results on open-domain Question Answering (QA), where latent representations of questions and passages are exploited for maximum inner product search in the retrieval process. However,…

Spoken Question Answering (SQA) is to find the answer from a spoken document given a question, which is crucial for personal assistants when replying to the queries from the users. Existing SQA methods all rely on Automatic Speech…

Information retrieval (IR) or knowledge retrieval, is a critical component for many down-stream tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA). It is also very challenging, as it requires succinctness, completeness, and correctness. In…

In open-domain question answering, a model receives a text question as input and searches for the correct answer using a large evidence corpus. The retrieval step is especially difficult as typical evidence corpora have \textit{millions} of…

We introduce ART, a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require any labeled training data. Dense retrieval is a central challenge for open-domain tasks, such as Open QA, where…

We integrate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answering (QA) to realize a speech-driven QA system, and evaluate its performance. We adapt an N-gram language model to natural language questions, so that the input of our system…

Text-based machine comprehension (MC) systems have a wide-range of applications, and standard corpora exist for developing and evaluating approaches. There has been far less research on spoken question answering (SQA) systems. The SQA task…

Dense retrieval (DR) approaches based on powerful pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieved significant advances and have become a key component for modern open-domain question-answering systems. However, they require large amounts of…

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems can achieve high performance in terms of recognition accuracy. However, a perfectly accurate transcript still can be challenging to read due to disfluency, filter words, and other errata…

In open-domain question answering, dense passage retrieval has become a new paradigm to retrieve relevant passages for finding answers. Typically, the dual-encoder architecture is adopted to learn dense representations of questions and…

In knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (OpenQA), large language models (LLMs) often struggle to generate factual answers, relying solely on their internal (parametric) knowledge. To address this limitation,…

Conversational search provides a natural interface for information retrieval (IR). Recent approaches have demonstrated promising results in applying dense retrieval to conversational IR. However, training dense retrievers requires large…

Long-context multiple-choice question answering tasks require robust reasoning over extensive text sources. Since most of the pre-trained transformer models are restricted to processing only a few hundred words at a time, successful…