14,833 research outputs found
An Analysis of Mixed Initiative and Collaboration in Information-Seeking Dialogues
The ability to engage in mixed-initiative interaction is one of the core
requirements for a conversational search system. How to achieve this is poorly
understood. We propose a set of unsupervised metrics, termed ConversationShape,
that highlights the role each of the conversation participants plays by
comparing the distribution of vocabulary and utterance types. Using
ConversationShape as a lens, we take a closer look at several conversational
search datasets and compare them with other dialogue datasets to better
understand the types of dialogue interaction they represent, either driven by
the information seeker or the assistant. We discover that deviations from the
ConversationShape of a human-human dialogue of the same type is predictive of
the quality of a human-machine dialogue.Comment: SIGIR 2020 short conference pape
Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions
Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology
The relationship between IR and multimedia databases
Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient.\ud
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Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval.\ud
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Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database.\ud
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First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database.\ud
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Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer.\ud
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Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback.\ud
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We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing.\ud
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We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system
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
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