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Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled new ways to satisfy information needs. Although great strides have been made in applying them to settings like document ranking and short-form text generation, they still struggle to compose complete, accurate, and verifiable long-form reports. Reports with these qualities are necessary to satisfy the complex, nuanced, or multi-faceted information needs of users. In this perspective paper, we draw together opinions from industry and academia, and from a variety of related research areas, to present our vision for automatic report generation, and -- critically -- a flexible framework by which such reports can be evaluated. In contrast with other summarization tasks, automatic report generation starts with a detailed description of an information need, stating the necessary background, requirements, and scope of the report. Further, the generated reports should be complete, accurate, and verifiable. These qualities, which are desirable -- if not required -- in many analytic report-writing settings, require rethinking how to build and evaluate systems that exhibit these qualities. To foster new efforts in building these systems, we present an evaluation framework that draws on ideas found in various evaluations. To test completeness and accuracy, the framework uses nuggets of information, expressed as questions and answers, that need to be part of any high-quality generated report. Additionally, evaluation of citations that map claims made in the report to their source documents ensures verifiability., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, accepted at SIGIR 2024 as perspective paper

Recent work in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has shown the benefit of the Translate-Distill framework that trains a cross-language neural dual-encoder model using translation and distillation. However, Translate-Distill only supports a single document language. Multilingual information retrieval (MLIR), which ranks a multilingual document collection, is harder to train than CLIR because the model must assign comparable relevance scores to documents in different languages. This work extends Translate-Distill and propose Multilingual Translate-Distill (MTD) for MLIR. We show that ColBERT-X models trained with MTD outperform their counterparts trained ith Multilingual Translate-Train, which is the previous state-of-the-art training approach, by 5% to 25% in nDCG@20 and 15% to 45% in MAP. We also show that the model is robust to the way languages are mixed in training batches. Our implementation is available on GitHub., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, accepted at SIGIR 2024 as short paper

Multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) considers the problem of ranking documents in several languages for a query expressed in a language that may differ from any of those languages. Recent work has observed that approaches such as combining ranked lists representing a single document language each or using multilingual pretrained language models demonstrate a preference for one language over others. This results in systematic unfair treatment of documents in different languages. This work proposes a language fairness metric to evaluate whether documents across different languages are fairly ranked through statistical equivalence testing using the Kruskal-Wallis test. In contrast to most prior work in group fairness, we do not consider any language to be an unprotected group. Thus our proposed measure, PEER (Probability of EqualExpected Rank), is the first fairness metric specifically designed to capture the language fairness of MLIR systems. We demonstrate the behavior of PEER on artificial ranked lists. We also evaluate real MLIR systems on two publicly available benchmarks and show that the PEER scores align with prior analytical findings on MLIR fairness. Our implementation is compatible with ir-measures and is available at http://github.com/hltcoe/peer_measure., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, accepted at SIGIR 2024 as short paper

PLAID, an efficient implementation of the ColBERT late interaction bi-encoder using pretrained language models for ranking, consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in monolingual, cross-language, and multilingual retrieval. PLAID differs from ColBERT by assigning terms to clusters and representing those terms as cluster centroids plus compressed residual vectors. While PLAID is effective in batch experiments, its performance degrades in streaming settings where documents arrive over time because representations of new tokens may be poorly modeled by the earlier tokens used to select cluster centroids. PLAID Streaming Hierarchical Indexing that Runs on Terabytes of Temporal Text (PLAID SHIRTTT) addresses this concern using multi-phase incremental indexing based on hierarchical sharding. Experiments on ClueWeb09 and the multilingual NeuCLIR collection demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach both for the largest collection indexed to date by the ColBERT architecture and in the multilingual setting, respectively., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, accepted at SIGIR 2024 as short paper

Probabilistic Structured Queries (PSQ) is a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) method that uses translation probabilities statistically derived from aligned corpora. PSQ is a strong baseline for efficient CLIR using sparse indexing. It is, therefore, useful as the first stage in a cascaded neural CLIR system whose second stage is more effective but too inefficient to be used on its own to search a large text collection. In this reproducibility study, we revisit PSQ by introducing an efficient Python implementation. Unconstrained use of all translation probabilities that can be estimated from aligned parallel text would in the limit assign a weight to every vocabulary term, precluding use of an inverted index to serve queries efficiently. Thus, PSQ's effectiveness and efficiency both depend on how translation probabilities are pruned. This paper presents experiments over a range of modern CLIR test collections to demonstrate that achieving Pareto optimal PSQ effectiveness-efficiency tradeoffs benefits from multi-criteria pruning, which has not been fully explored in prior work. Our Python PSQ implementation is available on GitHub(https://github.com/hltcoe/PSQ) and unpruned translation tables are available on Huggingface Models(https://huggingface.co/hltcoe/psq_translation_tables)., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

This paper describes the submission runs from the HLTCOE team at the CIRAL CLIR tasks for African languages at FIRE 2023. Our submissions use machine translation models to translate the documents and the training passages, and ColBERT-X as the retrieval model. Additionally, we present a set of unofficial runs that use an alternative training procedure with a similar training setting., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. System description paper for HLTCOE's participation in CIRAL@FIRE 2023

The HLTCOE team applied PLAID, an mT5 reranker, and document translation to the TREC 2023 NeuCLIR track. For PLAID we included a variety of models and training techniques -- the English model released with ColBERT v2, translate-train~(TT), Translate Distill~(TD) and multilingual translate-train~(MTT). TT trains a ColBERT model with English queries and passages automatically translated into the document language from the MS-MARCO v1 collection. This results in three cross-language models for the track, one per language. MTT creates a single model for all three document languages by combining the translations of MS-MARCO passages in all three languages into mixed-language batches. Thus the model learns about matching queries to passages simultaneously in all languages. Distillation uses scores from the mT5 model over non-English translated document pairs to learn how to score query-document pairs. The team submitted runs to all NeuCLIR tasks: the CLIR and MLIR news task as well as the technical documents task., Comment: 6 pages. Part of TREC 2023 Proceedings

The principal goal of the TREC Neural Cross-Language Information Retrieval (NeuCLIR) track is to study the impact of neural approaches to cross-language information retrieval. The track has created four collections, large collections of Chinese, Persian, and Russian newswire and a smaller collection of Chinese scientific abstracts. The principal tasks are ranked retrieval of news in one of the three languages, using English topics. Results for a multilingual task, also with English topics but with documents from all three newswire collections, are also reported. New in this second year of the track is a pilot technical documents CLIR task for ranked retrieval of Chinese technical documents using English topics. A total of 220 runs across all tasks were submitted by six participating teams and, as baselines, by track coordinators. Task descriptions and results are presented., Comment: 27 pages, 17 figures. Part of the TREC 2023 Proceedings

Prior work on English monolingual retrieval has shown that a cross-encoder trained using a large number of relevance judgments for query-document pairs can be used as a teacher to train more efficient, but similarly effective, dual-encoder student models. Applying a similar knowledge distillation approach to training an efficient dual-encoder model for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, is challenging due to the lack of a sufficiently large training collection when the query and document languages differ. The state of the art for CLIR thus relies on translating queries, documents, or both from the large English MS MARCO training set, an approach called Translate-Train. This paper proposes an alternative, Translate-Distill, in which knowledge distillation from either a monolingual cross-encoder or a CLIR cross-encoder is used to train a dual-encoder CLIR student model. This richer design space enables the teacher model to perform inference in an optimized setting, while training the student model directly for CLIR. Trained models and artifacts are publicly available on Huggingface., Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, accepted at ECIR 2024

A key stumbling block for neural cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems has been the paucity of training data. The appearance of the MS MARCO monolingual training set led to significant advances in the state of the art in neural monolingual retrieval. By translating the MS MARCO documents into other languages using machine translation, this resource has been made useful to the CLIR community. Yet such translation suffers from a number of problems. While MS MARCO is a large resource, it is of fixed size; its genre and domain of discourse are fixed; and the translated documents are not written in the language of a native speaker of the language, but rather in translationese. To address these problems, we introduce the JH-POLO CLIR training set creation methodology. The approach begins by selecting a pair of non-English passages. A generative large language model is then used to produce an English query for which the first passage is relevant and the second passage is not relevant. By repeating this process, collections of arbitrary size can be created in the style of MS MARCO but using naturally-occurring documents in any desired genre and domain of discourse. This paper describes the methodology in detail, shows its use in creating new CLIR training sets, and describes experiments using the newly created training data., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures

This is the first year of the TREC Neural CLIR (NeuCLIR) track, which aims to study the impact of neural approaches to cross-language information retrieval. The main task in this year's track was ad hoc ranked retrieval of Chinese, Persian, or Russian newswire documents using queries expressed in English. Topics were developed using standard TREC processes, except that topics developed by an annotator for one language were assessed by a different annotator when evaluating that topic on a different language. There were 172 total runs submitted by twelve teams., Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures, 10 tables. Part of the Thirty-First Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2022) Proceedings. Replace the misplaced Russian result table

A popular approach to creating a zero-shot cross-language retrieval model is to substitute a monolingual pretrained language model in the retrieval model with a multilingual pretrained language model such as Multilingual BERT. This multilingual model is fined-tuned to the retrieval task with monolingual data such as English MS MARCO using the same training recipe as the monolingual retrieval model used. However, such transferred models suffer from mismatches in the languages of the input text during training and inference. In this work, we propose transferring monolingual retrieval models using adapters, a parameter-efficient component for a transformer network. By adding adapters pretrained on language tasks for a specific language with task-specific adapters, prior work has shown that the adapter-enhanced models perform better than fine-tuning the entire model when transferring across languages in various NLP tasks. By constructing dense retrieval models with adapters, we show that models trained with monolingual data are more effective than fine-tuning the entire model when transferring to a Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) setting. However, we found that the prior suggestion of replacing the language adapters to match the target language at inference time is suboptimal for dense retrieval models. We provide an in-depth analysis of this discrepancy between other cross-language NLP tasks and CLIR., Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure

Providing access to information across languages has been a goal of Information Retrieval (IR) for decades. While progress has been made on Cross Language IR (CLIR) where queries are expressed in one language and documents in another, the multilingual (MLIR) task to create a single ranked list of documents across many languages is considerably more challenging. This paper investigates whether advances in neural document translation and pretrained multilingual neural language models enable improvements in the state of the art over earlier MLIR techniques. The results show that although combining neural document translation with neural ranking yields the best Mean Average Precision (MAP), 98% of that MAP score can be achieved with an 84% reduction in indexing time by using a pretrained XLM-R multilingual language model to index documents in their native language, and that 2% difference in effectiveness is not statistically significant. Key to achieving these results for MLIR is to fine-tune XLM-R using mixed-language batches from neural translations of MS MARCO passages., Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, accepted at ECIR 2023

While there are high-quality software frameworks for information retrieval experimentation, they do not explicitly support cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). To fill this gap, we have created Patapsco, a Python CLIR framework. This framework specifically addresses the complexity that comes with running experiments in multiple languages. Patapsco is designed to be extensible to many language pairs, to be scalable to large document collections, and to support reproducible experiments driven by a configuration file. We include Patapsco results on standard CLIR collections using multiple settings., Comment: 5 pages, accepted at ECIR 2022 as a demo paper

HC4 is a new suite of test collections for ad hoc Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), with Common Crawl News documents in Chinese, Persian, and Russian, topics in English and in the document languages, and graded relevance judgments. New test collections are needed because existing CLIR test collections built using pooling of traditional CLIR runs have systematic gaps in their relevance judgments when used to evaluate neural CLIR methods. The HC4 collections contain 60 topics and about half a million documents for each of Chinese and Persian, and 54 topics and five million documents for Russian. Active learning was used to determine which documents to annotate after being seeded using interactive search and judgment. Documents were judged on a three-grade relevance scale. This paper describes the design and construction of the new test collections and provides baseline results for demonstrating their utility for evaluating systems., Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, accepted at ECIR 2022

The advent of transformer-based models such as BERT has led to the rise of neural ranking models. These models have improved the effectiveness of retrieval systems well beyond that of lexical term matching models such as BM25. While monolingual retrieval tasks have benefited from large-scale training collections such as MS MARCO and advances in neural architectures, cross-language retrieval tasks have fallen behind these advancements. This paper introduces ColBERT-X, a generalization of the ColBERT multi-representation dense retrieval model that uses the XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R) encoder to support cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). ColBERT-X can be trained in two ways. In zero-shot training, the system is trained on the English MS MARCO collection, relying on the XLM-R encoder for cross-language mappings. In translate-train, the system is trained on the MS MARCO English queries coupled with machine translations of the associated MS MARCO passages. Results on ad hoc document ranking tasks in several languages demonstrate substantial and statistically significant improvements of these trained dense retrieval models over traditional lexical CLIR baselines., Comment: Accepted at ECIR 2022 (Full paper)

Entity linking -- the task of identifying references in free text to relevant knowledge base representations -- often focuses on single languages. We consider multilingual entity linking, where a single model is trained to link references to same-language knowledge bases in several languages. We propose a neural ranker architecture, which leverages multilingual transformer representations of text to be easily applied to a multilingual setting. We then explore how a neural ranker trained in one language (e.g. English) transfers to an unseen language (e.g. Chinese), and find that while there is a consistent but not large drop in performance. How can this drop in performance be alleviated? We explore adding an adversarial objective to force our model to learn language-invariant representations. We find that using this approach improves recall in several datasets, often matching the in-language performance, thus alleviating some of the performance loss occurring from zero-shot transfer.

Cross-language entity linking grounds mentions in multiple languages to a single-language knowledge base. We propose a neural ranking architecture for this task that uses multilingual BERT representations of the mention and the context in a neural network. We find that the multilingual ability of BERT leads to robust performance in monolingual and multilingual settings. Furthermore, we explore zero-shot language transfer and find surprisingly robust performance. We investigate the zero-shot degradation and find that it can be partially mitigated by a proposed auxiliary training objective, but that the remaining error can best be attributed to domain shift rather than language transfer., Comment: Accepted in the Findings of ACL 2021

The goal of this work is to improve the performance of a neural named entity recognition system by adding input features that indicate a word is part of a name included in a gazetteer. This article describes how to generate gazetteers from the Wikidata knowledge graph as well as how to integrate the information into a neural NER system. Experiments reveal that the approach yields performance gains in two distinct languages: a high-resource, word-based language, English and a high-resource, character-based language, Chinese. Experiments were also performed in a low-resource language, Russian on a newly annotated Russian NER corpus from Reddit tagged with four core types and twelve extended types. This article reports a baseline score. It is a longer version of a paper in the 33rd FLAIRS conference (Song et al. 2020)., Comment: Short version accepted to the 33rd FLAIRS conference

Most work on building knowledge bases has focused on collecting entities and facts from as large a collection of documents as possible. We argue for and describe a new paradigm where the focus is on a high-recall extraction over a small collection of documents under the supervision of a human expert, that we call Interactive Knowledge Base Population (IKBP).