Related papers: IRLab@iKAT24: Learned Sparse Retrieval with Multi-…

Information-seeking conversation, which aims to help users gather information through conversation, has achieved great progress in recent years. However, the research is still stymied by the scarcity of training data. To alleviate this…

In this paper, we demonstrate how Large Language Models (LLMs) can effectively learn to use an off-the-shelf information retrieval (IR) system specifically when additional context is required to answer a given question. Given the…

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing. However, these models face challenges in retrieving precise information from vast datasets. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) was developed to…

As a cornerstone of modern information access, search engines have become indispensable in everyday life. With the rapid advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs),…

Aspect-based summarization has attracted significant attention for its ability to generate more fine-grained and user-aligned summaries. While most existing approaches assume a set of predefined aspects as input, real-world scenarios often…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) empowers large language models (LLMs) to utilize external knowledge sources. The increasing capacity of LLMs to process longer input sequences opens up avenues for providing more retrieved information,…

A lot of recent work has focused on sparse learned indexes that use deep neural architectures to significantly improve retrieval quality while keeping the efficiency benefits of the inverted index. While such sparse learned structures…

Understanding user queries is fundamental in many applications, such as home assistants, booking systems, or recommendations. Accordingly, it is crucial to develop accurate Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) approaches to ensure the…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated strong performance in multilingual question-answering (QA) tasks by leveraging relevant passages retrieved from corpora. In multilingual RAG (mRAG), the…

With the breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), query generation techniques that expand documents and queries with related terms are becoming increasingly popular in the information retrieval field. Such techniques have been shown…

Generating diverse and effective clarifying questions is crucial for improving query understanding and retrieval performance in open-domain conversational search (CS) systems. We propose AGENT-CQ (Automatic GENeration, and evaluaTion of…

In the domain of digital information dissemination, search engines act as pivotal conduits linking information seekers with providers. The advent of chat-based search engines utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented…

There has been limited success for dense retrieval models in multilingual retrieval, due to uneven and scarce training data available across multiple languages. Synthetic training data generation is promising (e.g., InPars or Promptagator),…

This paper describes the participation of UvA.ILPS group at the TREC CAsT 2020 track. Our passage retrieval pipeline consists of (i) an initial retrieval module that uses BM25, and (ii) a re-ranking module that combines the score of a BERT…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the importance of extending context lengths for handling complex tasks. While traditional methods for training on long contexts often use filtered long documents, these…

Conversational recommendation (ConvRec) systems must understand rich and diverse natural language (NL) expressions of user preferences and intents, often communicated in an indirect manner (e.g., "I'm watching my weight"). Such complex…

As the demand for long-context large language models (LLMs) increases, models with context windows of up to 128K or 1M tokens are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, long-context LLM inference is challenging since the inference speed…

In-context learning (ICL), teaching a large language model (LLM) to perform a task with few-shot demonstrations rather than adjusting the model parameters, has emerged as a strong paradigm for using LLMs. While early studies primarily used…

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have led to the development of NLP-based recommender systems that have shown superior performance. However, current models commonly treat items as mere IDs and adopt discriminative…

Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during…