Related papers: Counterfactual Query Rewriting to Use Historical R…

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging…

In product search, users tend to browse results on multiple search result pages (SERPs) (e.g., for queries on clothing and shoes) before deciding which item to purchase. Users' clicks can be considered as implicit feedback which indicates…

Getting relevant information from search engines has been the heart of research works in information retrieval. Query expansion is a retrieval technique that has been studied and proved to yield positive results in relevance. Users are…

Logs of the interactions with a search engine show that users often reformulate their queries. Examining these reformulations shows that recommendations that precise the focus of a query are helpful, like those based on expansions of the…

The increasing demand for the web-based digital assistants has given a rapid rise in the interest of the Information Retrieval (IR) community towards the field of conversational question answering (ConvQA). However, one of the critical…

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework for incorporating external knowledge, usually in the form of a set of documents retrieved from a collection, as a part of a prompt to a large language model (LLM) to potentially improve…

Currently, the quality of a search engine is often determined using so-called topical relevance, i.e., the match between the user intent (expressed as a query) and the content of the document. In this work we want to draw attention to two…

As machine learning is increasingly used to inform consequential decision-making (e.g., pre-trial bail and loan approval), it becomes important to explain how the system arrived at its decision, and also suggest actions to achieve a…

Reranker models aim to re-rank the passages based on the semantics similarity between the given query and passages, which have recently received more attention due to the wide application of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Most previous…

In factual question answering, many errors are not failures of access but failures of commitment: the system retrieves relevant evidence, yet still settles on the wrong answer. We present CounterRefine, a lightweight repair layer for…

Frequently asked question (FAQ) retrieval, with the purpose of providing information on frequent questions or concerns, has far-reaching applications in many areas, where a collection of question-answer (Q-A) pairs compiled a priori can be…

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…

The problem of Information Retrieval is, given a set of documents D and a query q, providing an algorithm for retrieving all documents in D relevant to q. However, retrieval should depend and be updated whenever the user is able to provide…

Extracting query-document relevance from the sparse, biased clickthrough log is among the most fundamental tasks in the web search system. Prior art mainly learns a relevance judgment model with semantic features of the query and document…

Inspired by the PageRank and HITS (hubs and authorities) algorithms for Web search, we propose a structural re-ranking approach to ad hoc information retrieval: we reorder the documents in an initially retrieved set by exploiting asymmetric…

As machine learning continues to gain prominence, transparency and explainability are increasingly critical. Without an understanding of these models, they can replicate and worsen human bias, adversely affecting marginalized communities.…

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is a classical approach to address lexical mismatch by enriching the query using first-pass retrieval. Moreover, recent work on generative-relevance feedback (GRF) shows that query expansion models using text…

BERT-based text ranking models have dramatically advanced the state-of-the-art in ad-hoc retrieval, wherein most models tend to consider individual query-document pairs independently. In the mean time, the importance and usefulness to…

Classic retrieval methods use simple bag-of-word representations for queries and documents. This representation fails to capture the full semantic richness of queries and documents. More recent retrieval models have tried to overcome this…

Recent studies show that Generative Relevance Feedback (GRF), using text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), can enhance the effectiveness of query expansion. However, LLMs can generate irrelevant information that harms retrieval…