20,738 research outputs found
Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering
Conversational search is one of the ultimate goals of information retrieval.
Recent research approaches conversational search by simplified settings of
response ranking and conversational question answering, where an answer is
either selected from a given candidate set or extracted from a given passage.
These simplifications neglect the fundamental role of retrieval in
conversational search. To address this limitation, we introduce an
open-retrieval conversational question answering (ORConvQA) setting, where we
learn to retrieve evidence from a large collection before extracting answers,
as a further step towards building functional conversational search systems. We
create a dataset, OR-QuAC, to facilitate research on ORConvQA. We build an
end-to-end system for ORConvQA, featuring a retriever, a reranker, and a reader
that are all based on Transformers. Our extensive experiments on OR-QuAC
demonstrate that a learnable retriever is crucial for ORConvQA. We further show
that our system can make a substantial improvement when we enable history
modeling in all system components. Moreover, we show that the reranker
component contributes to the model performance by providing a regularization
effect. Finally, further in-depth analyses are performed to provide new
insights into ORConvQA.Comment: Accepted to SIGIR'2
Composite Correlation Quantization for Efficient Multimodal Retrieval
Efficient similarity retrieval from large-scale multimodal database is
pervasive in modern search engines and social networks. To support queries
across content modalities, the system should enable cross-modal correlation and
computation-efficient indexing. While hashing methods have shown great
potential in achieving this goal, current attempts generally fail to learn
isomorphic hash codes in a seamless scheme, that is, they embed multiple
modalities in a continuous isomorphic space and separately threshold embeddings
into binary codes, which incurs substantial loss of retrieval accuracy. In this
paper, we approach seamless multimodal hashing by proposing a novel Composite
Correlation Quantization (CCQ) model. Specifically, CCQ jointly finds
correlation-maximal mappings that transform different modalities into
isomorphic latent space, and learns composite quantizers that convert the
isomorphic latent features into compact binary codes. An optimization framework
is devised to preserve both intra-modal similarity and inter-modal correlation
through minimizing both reconstruction and quantization errors, which can be
trained from both paired and partially paired data in linear time. A
comprehensive set of experiments clearly show the superior effectiveness and
efficiency of CCQ against the state of the art hashing methods for both
unimodal and cross-modal retrieval
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