Related papers: When More Reformulations Hurt: Avoiding Drift usin…

Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…

We study leveraging adaptive retrieval to ensure sufficient "bridge" documents are retrieved for reasoning-intensive retrieval. Bridge documents are those that contribute to the reasoning process yet are not directly relevant to the initial…

Retrieve-and-rerank is a prevalent framework in neural information retrieval, wherein a bi-encoder network initially retrieves a pre-defined number of candidates (e.g., K=100), which are then reranked by a more powerful cross-encoder model.…

The classical cascading pipeline of retrieve--rerank suffers from a bounded recall problem, stemming from limitations of the first-stage retriever. Most current approaches address the bounded recall problem by improving the first-stage…

Search engines play an important role in our everyday lives by assisting us in finding the information we need. When we input a complex query, however, results are often far from satisfactory. In this work, we introduce a query…

Performing automatic reformulations of a user's query is a popular paradigm used in information retrieval (IR) for improving effectiveness -- as exemplified by the pseudo-relevance feedback approaches, which expand the query in order to…

The widely used retrieve-and-rerank pipeline faces two critical limitations: they are constrained by the initial retrieval quality of the top-k documents, and the growing computational demands of LLM-based rerankers restrict the number of…

Reranking is a critical stage in contemporary information retrieval (IR) systems, improving the relevance of the user-presented final results by honing initial candidate sets. This paper is a thorough guide to examine the changing reranker…

We present ReFormeR, a pattern-guided approach for query reformulation. Instead of prompting a language model to generate reformulations of a query directly, ReFormeR first elicits short reformulation patterns from pairs of initial queries…

Search systems often employ a re-ranking pipeline, wherein documents (or passages) from an initial pool of candidates are assigned new ranking scores. The process enables the use of highly-effective but expensive scoring functions that are…

Query Reformulation (QR) is a set of techniques used to transform a user's original search query to a text that better aligns with the user's intent and improves their search experience. Recently, zero-shot QR has been a promising approach…

Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) enables access to multilingual knowledge but remains challenging due to disparities in resources, scripts, and weak cross-lingual semantic alignment in embedding models. Existing pipelines often…

Deep learning models named transformers achieved state-of-the-art results in a vast majority of NLP tasks at the cost of increased computational complexity and high memory consumption. Using the transformer model in real-time inference…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now widely used for query reformulation and expansion in Information Retrieval, with many studies reporting substantial effectiveness gains. However, these results are typically obtained under heterogeneous…

Query reformulation is a well-known problem in Information Retrieval (IR) aimed at enhancing single search successful completion rate by automatically modifying user's input query. Recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to…

Information retrieval systems are crucial for enabling effective access to large document collections. Recent approaches have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance retrieval performance through query augmentation, but often rely…

Rerankers, typically cross-encoders, are computationally intensive but are frequently used because they are widely assumed to outperform cheaper initial IR systems. We challenge this assumption by measuring reranker performance for full…

Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage relevant content retrieved by information retrieval systems to generate correct responses, aiming to alleviate the hallucination problem. However, existing retriever-responder…

Modern retrieval pipelines increasingly serve downstream consumers like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous agents that need more than a scalar relevance score. A reranker that only tells the caller "how relevant" forces the…

Financial analysts face significant challenges extracting information from lengthy 10-K reports, which often exceed 100 pages. This paper presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed to answer questions about S&P 500…