相关论文: Leveraging Query Resolution and Reading Comprehens…

Pre-trained contextual language models such as BERT, GPT, and XLnet work quite well for document retrieval tasks. Such models are fine-tuned based on the query-document/query-passage level relevance labels to capture the ranking signals.…

Interacting with a speech interface to query a Question Answering (QA) system is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, QA systems rely on passage retrieval to select candidate contexts and reading comprehension to extract the final…

With the improvements in speech recognition and voice generation technologies over the last years, a lot of companies have sought to develop conversation understanding systems that run on mobile phones or smart home devices through natural…

The 2025 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) featured both interactive and offline submission tasks. The former requires systems to operate under real-time constraints, making robustness and efficiency as important as…

This study considers the task of machine reading at scale (MRS) wherein, given a question, a system first performs the information retrieval (IR) task of finding relevant passages in a knowledge source and then carries out the reading…

Question answering systems usually use keyword searches to retrieve potential passages related to a question, and then extract the answer from passages with the machine reading comprehension methods. However, many questions tend to be…

The Recherche Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique (RALI) team participated in the 2024 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance (iKAT) Track. In personalized conversational search, effectively capturing a user's complex search intent…

Recent advances in dense retrieval techniques have offered the promise of being able not just to re-rank documents using contextualised language models such as BERT, but also to use such models to identify documents from the collection in…

General-purpose pretrained sentence encoders such as BERT are not ideal for real-world conversational AI applications; they are computationally heavy, slow, and expensive to train. We propose ConveRT (Conversational Representations from…

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) involves multiple subtasks, i) to understand incomplete questions in their context, ii) to retrieve relevant information, and iii) to generate answers. This work presents PRAISE, a pipeline-based…

Question-answering (QA) is an important application of Information Retrieval (IR) and language models, and the latest trend is toward pre-trained large neural networks with embedding parameters. Augmenting QA performances with these LLMs…

We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and…

Recent progress in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is driving fast-paced advances in Information Retrieval (IR), largely owed to fine-tuning deep language models (LMs) for document ranking. While remarkably effective, the ranking…

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval research. For decades, lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but it also has inherent defects, such as the vocabulary mismatch problem.…

This study aims at solving the Machine Reading Comprehension problem where questions have to be answered given a context passage. The challenge is to develop a computationally faster model which will have improved inference time. State of…

In conversational machine reading, systems need to interpret natural language rules, answer high-level questions such as "May I qualify for VA health care benefits?", and ask follow-up clarification questions whose answer is necessary to…

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models boost task performance, owing to the retriever that provides external knowledge. Although crucial, the retriever primarily focuses on semantics relevance, which may not always be effective for generation.…

We introduce SetBERT, a fine-tuned BERT-based model designed to enhance query embeddings for set operations and Boolean logic queries, such as Intersection (AND), Difference (NOT), and Union (OR). SetBERT significantly improves retrieval…

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of using large language language models (LLMs) in passage ranking. The listwise approaches, such as RankGPT, have become new state-of-the-art in this task. However, the efficiency of…

Multihop Question Answering (QA) requires systems to identify and synthesize information from multiple text passages. While most prior retrieval methods assist in identifying relevant passages for QA, further assessing the utility of the…