Question-answering systems are recognized as popular and frequently effective means of
information seeking on the web. In such systems, information seekers can receive a concise …

Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved impressive
results on various natural language processing benchmarks. Benefiting from multiple …

We focus on the task of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) retrieval. A given user query can
be matched against the questions and/or the answers in the FAQ. We present a fully …

We study the zero-shot transfer capabilities of text matching models on a massive scale, by
self-supervised training on 140 source domains from community question answering forums …

Passage ranking has attracted considerable attention due to its importance in information
retrieval (IR) and question answering (QA). Prior works have shown that pre-trained …

We describe a weakly-supervised method for training deep learning models for the task of
ad-hoc document retrieval. Our method is based on generative and discriminative models …

Knowledge about personally familiar people and places is extremely rich and varied,
involving pieces of semantic information connected in unpredictable ways through past …

We investigated how users evaluate passage-length answers for non-factoid questions. We
conduct a study where answers were presented to users, sometimes shown with automatic …

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 …

The field of Question Answering Systems (QAS) is rapidly evolving, and the search for
effective systems has expanded beyond factoid questions to include non-factoid questions …