Related papers: Unsupervised dense retrieval with conterfactual co…

Dialogue systems can benefit from being able to search through a corpus of text to find information relevant to user requests, especially when encountering a request for which no manually curated response is available. The state-of-the-art…

To extract answers from a large corpus, open-domain question answering (QA) systems usually rely on information retrieval (IR) techniques to narrow the search space. Standard inverted index methods such as TF-IDF are commonly used as thanks…

Retrieving relevant contexts from a large corpus is a crucial step for tasks such as open-domain question answering and fact checking. Although neural retrieval outperforms traditional methods like tf-idf and BM25, its performance degrades…

Crafting adversarial examples has become an important technique to evaluate the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, most existing works focus on attacking the image classification problem since its input space is continuous…

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot document ranking is done in one of two ways: (1) prompt-based re-ranking methods, which require no further training but are only feasible for re-ranking a handful of candidate documents…

Text classification is a crucial and fundamental task in web content mining. Compared with the previous learning paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning by cross entropy loss, the recently proposed supervised contrastive learning approach…

Discrete adversarial attacks are symbolic perturbations to a language input that preserve the output label but lead to a prediction error. While such attacks have been extensively explored for the purpose of evaluating model robustness,…

Deep learning models tend not to be out-of-distribution robust primarily due to their reliance on spurious features to solve the task. Counterfactual data augmentations provide a general way of (approximately) achieving representations that…

Counterfactual Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithms learn a ranking model from logged user interactions, often collected using a production system. Employing such an offline learning approach has many benefits compared to an online one, but it…

Distant supervision has become the standard method for relation extraction. However, even though it is an efficient method, it does not come at no cost---The resulted distantly-supervised training samples are often very noisy. To combat the…

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Recent advances in neural information retrieval (IR) models have significantly enhanced their effectiveness over various IR tasks. The robustness of these models, essential for ensuring their reliability in practice, has also garnered…

Contrastive learning has proven to be an effective method for pre-training models using weakly labeled data in the vision domain. Sentence transformers are the NLP counterparts to this architecture, and have been growing in popularity due…

While the current state-of-the-art dense retrieval models exhibit strong out-of-domain generalization, they might fail to capture nuanced domain-specific knowledge. In principle, fine-tuning these models for specialized retrieval tasks…

Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are typically…

Text retrieval using learned dense representations has recently emerged as a promising alternative to "traditional" text retrieval using sparse bag-of-words representations. One recent work that has garnered much attention is the dense…

Dense embedding-based text retrieval$\unicode{x2013}$retrieval of relevant passages from corpora via deep learning encodings$\unicode{x2013}$has emerged as a powerful method attaining state-of-the-art search results and popularizing…

Despite the advantages of their low-resource settings, traditional sparse retrievers depend on exact matching approaches between high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representations of both the queries and the collection. As a result,…

Unsupervised domain adaptation generalizes neural retrievers to an unseen domain by generating pseudo queries on target domain documents. The quality and efficiency of this adaptation critically depend on which documents are selected for…

Recent studies have proposed leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as information retrievers through query rewriting. However, for challenging corpora, we argue that enhancing queries alone is insufficient for robust semantic matching;…