Related papers: IRLab@iKAT24: Learned Sparse Retrieval with Multi-…
Conversational information seeking has evolved rapidly in the last few years with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the basis for interpreting and responding in a naturalistic manner to user requests. The extended…
Conversational Information Seeking has evolved rapidly in the last few years with the development of Large Language Models providing the basis for interpreting and responding in a naturalistic manner to user requests. iKAT emphasizes the…
The Recherche Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique (RALI) team participated in the 2024 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance (iKAT) Track. In personalized conversational search, effectively capturing a user's complex search intent…
This paper presents our approach to the TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT), which focuses on improving conversational information-seeking (CIS) systems. While recent advancements in CIS have improved conversational agents'…
Personalized Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR) has seen rapid progress in recent years, driven by the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). Personalized CIR aims to enhance document retrieval by leveraging user-specific…
Query rewriting plays a vital role in enhancing conversational search by transforming context-dependent user queries into standalone forms. Existing approaches primarily leverage human-rewritten queries as labels to train query rewriting…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a way to complement the in-context knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external documents. However, real-world applications demand not only accuracy but also…
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…
Conversational information seeking (CIS) systems aim to model the user's information need within the conversational context and retrieve the relevant information. One major approach to modeling the conversational context aims to rewrite the…
This paper contains what the Georgetown InfoSense group has done in regard to solving the challenges presented by TREC iKAT 2023. Our submitted runs outperform the median runs by a significant margin, exhibiting superior performance in nDCG…
The 2025 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) featured both interactive and offline submission tasks. The former requires systems to operate under real-time constraints, making robustness and efficiency as important as…
The late interaction paradigm introduced with ColBERT stands out in the neural Information Retrieval space, offering a compelling effectiveness-efficiency trade-off across many benchmarks. Efficient late interaction retrieval is based on an…
In recent years, dense retrieval has been the focus of information retrieval (IR) research. While effective, dense retrieval produces uninterpretable dense vectors, and suffers from the drawback of large index size. Learned sparse retrieval…
Retrieval augmentation is critical when Language Models (LMs) exploit non-parametric knowledge related to the query through external knowledge bases before reasoning. The retrieved information is incorporated into LMs as context alongside…
Knowledge Tracing (KT) models students' evolving knowledge states to predict future performance, serving as a foundation for personalized education. While traditional deep learning models achieve high accuracy, they often lack…
Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent…
We introduce a novel large language model (LLM)-driven agent framework, which iteratively refines queries and filters contextual evidence by leveraging dynamically evolving knowledge. A defining feature of the system is its decoupling of…
Precisely understanding users' contextual search intent has been an important challenge for conversational search. As conversational search sessions are much more diverse and long-tailed, existing methods trained on limited data still show…
Information retrieval (IR) systems have played a vital role in modern digital life and have cemented their continued usefulness in this new era of generative AI via retrieval-augmented generation. With strong language processing…
Search engines are crucial as they provide an efficient and easy way to access vast amounts of information on the internet for diverse information needs. User queries, even with a specific need, can differ significantly. Prior research has…