Related papers: Bridging the Gap: From Ad-hoc to Proactive Search …
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for conversational speech remains challenging due to the limited availability of large-scale, well-annotated multi-speaker dialogue data and the complex temporal dynamics of natural interactions.…
Conversational information seeking (CIS) is playing an increasingly important role in connecting people to information. Due to the lack of suitable resource, previous studies on CIS are limited to the study of theoretical/conceptual…
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…
Conversational passage retrieval is challenging as it often requires the resolution of references to previous utterances and needs to deal with the complexities of natural language, such as coreference and ellipsis. To address these…
In speech processing pipelines, improving the quality and intelligibility of real-world recordings is crucial. While supervised regression is the primary method for speech enhancement, audio tokenization is emerging as a promising…
Pertinence Feedback is a technique that enables a user to interactively express his information requirement by modifying his original query formulation with further information. This information is provided by explicitly confirming the…
Open-domain question answering can be formulated as a phrase retrieval problem, in which we can expect huge scalability and speed benefit but often suffer from low accuracy due to the limitation of existing phrase representation models. In…
The conversational search task aims to enable a user to resolve information needs via natural language dialogue with an agent. In this paper, we aim to develop a conceptual framework of the actions and intents of users and agents explaining…
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to proactively capture user preferences through natural language dialogue and recommend high-quality items. To achieve this, CRS gathers user preferences via a dialog module and builds user…
Any-to-any voice conversion (VC) aims to convert the timbre of utterances from and to any speakers seen or unseen during training. Various any-to-any VC approaches have been proposed like AUTOVC, AdaINVC, and FragmentVC. AUTOVC, and AdaINVC…
In modern online platforms, search and recommendation (S&R) often coexist, offering opportunities for performance improvement through search-enhanced approaches. Existing studies show that incorporating search signals boosts recommendation…
Retrieved documents containing noise will hinder RAG from detecting answer clues and make the inference process slow and expensive. Therefore, context compression is necessary to enhance its accuracy and efficiency. Existing context…
Accurately retrieving relevant bid keywords for user queries is critical in Sponsored Search but remains challenging, particularly for short, ambiguous queries. Existing dense and generative retrieval models often fail to capture nuanced…
Query expansion has been employed for a long time to improve the accuracy of query retrievers. Earlier works relied on pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) techniques, which augment a query with terms extracted from documents retrieved in a…
In a conversational context, a user expresses her multi-faceted information need as a sequence of natural-language questions, i.e., utterances. Starting from a given topic, the conversation evolves through user utterances and system…
This paper presents a robust multi-channel speaker extraction algorithm designed to handle inaccuracies in reference information. While existing approaches often rely solely on either spatial or spectral cues to identify the target speaker,…
Recently, methods have been developed to improve the performance of dense passage retrieval by using context-supervised pre-training. These methods simply consider two passages from the same document to be relevant, without taking into…
Built upon the existing analysis of retrieval heads in large language models, we propose an alternative reranking framework that trains models to estimate passage-query relevance using the attention scores of selected heads. This approach…
In conversational settings, individuals exhibit unique behaviors, rendering a one-size-fits-all approach insufficient for generating responses by dialogue agents. Although past studies have aimed to create personalized dialogue agents using…
General-purpose text decoding approaches are usually adopted for dialogue response generation. Although the quality of the generated responses can be improved with dialogue-specific encoding methods, conversational decoding methods are…