Related papers: Bridging the Gap: From Ad-hoc to Proactive Search …
Recent studies on Question Answering (QA) and Conversational QA (ConvQA) emphasize the role of retrieval: a system first retrieves evidence from a large collection and then extracts answers. This open-retrieval ConvQA setting typically…
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'…
Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is commonly used to boost the performance of traditional information retrieval (IR) models by using top-ranked documents to identify and weight new query terms, thereby reducing the effect of query-document…
Pre-trained language models have been widely exploited to learn dense representations of documents and queries for information retrieval. While previous efforts have primarily focused on improving effectiveness and user satisfaction,…
Open-domain conversational question answering can be viewed as two tasks: passage retrieval and conversational question answering, where the former relies on selecting candidate passages from a large corpus and the latter requires better…
Personas are useful for dialogue response prediction. However, the personas used in current studies are pre-defined and hard to obtain before a conversation. To tackle this issue, we study a new task, named Speaker Persona Detection (SPD),…
End-to-end speech-to-speech (S2S) dialogue systems have recently garnered increasing research attention for their lower latency and more natural integration of nonverbal cues such as emotion and speaker identity. However, these systems face…
Conversational search systems, such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, provide a new search paradigm where users are allowed, via natural language dialogues, to communicate with search systems. Evaluating such systems is very…
Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external retrieval. However, they often over-search -- unnecessarily invoking search tool even when it does not improve response quality, which…
This paper describes a method based on a sequence-to-sequence learning (Seq2Seq) with attention and context preservation mechanism for voice conversion (VC) tasks. Seq2Seq has been outstanding at numerous tasks involving sequence modeling…
Analyzing large datasets requires responsive query execution, but executing SQL queries on massive datasets can be slow. This paper explores whether query execution can begin even before the user has finished typing, allowing results to…
Intent detection is a crucial component of modern conversational systems, since accurately identifying user intent at the beginning of a conversation is essential for generating effective responses. Recent efforts have focused on studying…
Pretrained language models have improved effectiveness on numerous tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval. Recent work has shown that continuing to pretrain a language model with auxiliary objectives before fine-tuning on the retrieval task can…
Speech enhancement promises higher efficiency in ad-hoc microphone arrays than in constrained microphone arrays thanks to the wide spatial coverage of the devices in the acoustic scene. However, speech enhancement in ad-hoc microphone…
Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains…
Stakeholders' conversations in requirements elicitation meetings hold valuable insights into system and client needs. However, manually extracting requirements is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors and biases. While…
Rapid response, namely low latency, is fundamental in search applications; it is particularly so in interactive search sessions, such as those encountered in conversational settings. An observation with a potential to reduce latency asserts…
Recommender systems are software applications that help users find items of interest in situations of information overload in a personalized way, using knowledge about the needs and preferences of individual users. In conversational…
Designing pre-training objectives that more closely resemble the downstream tasks for pre-trained language models can lead to better performance at the fine-tuning stage, especially in the ad-hoc retrieval area. Existing pre-training…
Effective prompting of generative AI is challenging for many users, particularly in expressing context for comprehension tasks such as explaining spreadsheet formulas, Python code, and text passages. Prompt middleware aims to address this…