Related papers: Better than the real thing? Iterative pseudo-query…
Question Answering (QA) is in increasing demand as the amount of information available online and the desire for quick access to this content grows. A common approach to QA has been to fine-tune a pretrained language model on a…
Natural language processing applications, such as conversational agents and their question-answering capabilities, are widely used in the real world. Despite the wide popularity of large language models (LLMs), few real-world conversational…
This paper outlines a conceptual framework for understanding recent developments in information retrieval and natural language processing that attempts to integrate dense and sparse retrieval methods. I propose a representational approach…
The rapid growth of web has resulted in vast volume of information. Information availability at a rapid speed to the user is vital. English language (or any for that matter) has lot of ambiguity in the usage of words. So there is no…
Prompting with natural language instructions has recently emerged as a popular method of harnessing the capabilities of large language models. Given the inherent ambiguity present in natural language, it is intuitive to consider the…
An effective method to generate a large number of parallel sentences for training improved neural machine translation (NMT) systems is the use of back-translations of the target-side monolingual data. Recently, iterative back-translation…
Causal language modeling (LM) uses word history to predict the next word. BERT, on the other hand, makes use of bi-directional word information in a sentence to predict words at masked positions. While BERT is effective in sequence…
Exploratory search aims to guide users through a corpus rather than pinpointing exact information. We propose an exploratory search system based on hierarchical clusters and document summaries using sentence embeddings. With sentence…
End-to-end speech recognition models are improved by incorporating external text sources, typically by fusion with an external language model. Such language models have to be retrained whenever the corpus of interest changes. Furthermore,…
Learning high-quality embeddings for rare words is a hard problem because of sparse context information. Mimicking (Pinter et al., 2017) has been proposed as a solution: given embeddings learned by a standard algorithm, a model is first…
Interactive search sessions often contain multiple queries, where the user submits a reformulated version of the previous query in response to the original results. We aim to enhance the query recommendation experience for a commercial…
Continual learning aims to learn new tasks incrementally using less computation and memory resources instead of retraining the model from scratch whenever new task arrives. However, existing approaches are designed in supervised fashion…
This thesis presents two similarity-based approaches to sparse data problems. The first approach is to build soft, hierarchical clusters: soft, because each event belongs to each cluster with some probability; hierarchical, because cluster…
Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) is known to improve the effectiveness of bag-of-words retrievers. At the same time, deep language models have been shown to outperform traditional bag-of-words rerankers. However, it is unclear how to…
The task of information retrieval is an important component of many natural language processing systems, such as open domain question answering. While traditional methods were based on hand-crafted features, continuous representations based…
This paper presents a novel query clustering approach to capture the broad interest areas of users querying search engines. We make use of recent advances in NLP - word2vec and extend it to get query2vec, vector representations of queries,…
Cascades and speculative decoding are two common approaches to improving language models' inference efficiency. Both approaches involve interleaving models of different sizes, but via fundamentally distinct mechanisms: cascades employ a…
Short text clustering is a challenging task due to the lack of signal contained in such short texts. In this work, we propose iterative classification as a method to b o ost the clustering quality (e.g., accuracy) of short texts. Given a…
Traditional information retrieval (such as that offered by web search engines) impedes users with information overload from extensive result pages and the need to manually locate the desired information therein. Conversely,…
Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and…