5,735 research outputs found
Utilizing sub-topical structure of documents for information retrieval.
Text segmentation in natural language processing typically refers to the process of decomposing a document into constituent subtopics. Our work centers on the application of text segmentation techniques within information retrieval (IR) tasks. For example, for scoring a document by combining the retrieval scores of its constituent segments, exploiting the proximity of query terms in documents for ad-hoc search, and for question answering (QA), where retrieved passages from multiple documents are aggregated and presented as a single document to a searcher. Feedback in ad hoc IR task is shown to benefit from the use of extracted sentences instead of terms from the pseudo relevant documents for query expansion. Retrieval effectiveness for patent prior art search task is enhanced by applying text segmentation to the patent queries. Another aspect of our work involves augmenting text segmentation techniques to produce segments which are more readable with less unresolved anaphora. This is particularly useful for QA and snippet generation tasks where the objective is to aggregate relevant and novel information from multiple documents satisfying user information need on one hand, and ensuring that the automatically generated content presented to the user is easily readable without reference to the original source document
Training Curricula for Open Domain Answer Re-Ranking
In precision-oriented tasks like answer ranking, it is more important to rank
many relevant answers highly than to retrieve all relevant answers. It follows
that a good ranking strategy would be to learn how to identify the easiest
correct answers first (i.e., assign a high ranking score to answers that have
characteristics that usually indicate relevance, and a low ranking score to
those with characteristics that do not), before incorporating more complex
logic to handle difficult cases (e.g., semantic matching or reasoning). In this
work, we apply this idea to the training of neural answer rankers using
curriculum learning. We propose several heuristics to estimate the difficulty
of a given training sample. We show that the proposed heuristics can be used to
build a training curriculum that down-weights difficult samples early in the
training process. As the training process progresses, our approach gradually
shifts to weighting all samples equally, regardless of difficulty. We present a
comprehensive evaluation of our proposed idea on three answer ranking datasets.
Results show that our approach leads to superior performance of two leading
neural ranking architectures, namely BERT and ConvKNRM, using both pointwise
and pairwise losses. When applied to a BERT-based ranker, our method yields up
to a 4% improvement in MRR and a 9% improvement in P@1 (compared to the model
trained without a curriculum). This results in models that can achieve
comparable performance to more expensive state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long
Information Retrieval: Recent Advances and Beyond
In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the models used for
information retrieval in the first and second stages of the typical processing
chain. We discuss the current state-of-the-art models, including methods based
on terms, semantic retrieval, and neural. Additionally, we delve into the key
topics related to the learning process of these models. This way, this survey
offers a comprehensive understanding of the field and is of interest for for
researchers and practitioners entering/working in the information retrieval
domain
Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR)
systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily
lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering,
and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its
origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models.
While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and
semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face
challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of
contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution
requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse
retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as
language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the
emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has
revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language
understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities.
Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR
systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary
to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a
comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs
and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers,
rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within
this expanding field
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