Domain adaptation presents significant challenges for out-of-domain text ranking, especially when supervised data is limited. In this paper, we present ReadQG (Relevance-Aware Diverse Query Generation), a method to generate informative synthetic queries to facilitate the adaptation process of text ranking models. Unlike previous approaches focusing solely on relevant query generation, our ReadQG generates diverse queries with continuous relevance scores. Specifically, we propose leveraging soft-prompt tuning and diverse generation objectives to control query generation according to the given relevance. Our experiments show that integrating negative queries into the learning process enhances the effectiveness of text ranking models in out-of-domain information retrieval (IR) benchmarks. Furthermore, we measure the quality of query generation, highlighting the underlying beneficial characteristics of negative queries. Our empirical results and analysis also shed light on potential directions for more advanced data augmentation in IR. The data and code have been released.

While internalized “implicit knowledge” in pretrained transformers has led to fruitful progress in many natural language understanding tasks, how to most effectively elicit such knowledge remains an open question. Based on the text-to-text transfer transformer (T5) model, this work explores a template-based approach to extract implicit knowledge for commonsense reasoning on multiple-choice (MC) question answering tasks. Experiments on three representative MC datasets show the surprisingly good performance of our simple template, coupled with a logit normalization technique for disambiguation. Furthermore, we verify that our proposed template can be easily extended to other MC tasks with contexts such as supporting facts in open-book question answering settings. Starting from the MC task, this work initiates further research to find generic natural language templates that can effectively leverage stored knowledge in pretrained models.

This paper presents a web-based information system, RiskFinder, for facilitating the analyses of soft and hard information in financial reports. In particular, the system broadens the analyses from the word level to sentence level, which makes the system useful for practitioner communities and unprecedented among financial academics. The proposed system has four main components: 1) a Form 10-K risk-sentiment dataset, consisting of a set of risk-labeled financial sentences and pre-trained sentence embeddings; 2) metadata, including basic information on each company that published the Form 10-K financial report as well as several relevant financial measures; 3) an interface that highlights risk-related sentences in the financial reports based on the latest sentence embedding techniques; 4) a visualization of financial time-series data for a corresponding company. This paper also conducts some case studies to showcase that the system can be of great help in capturing valuable insight within large amounts of textual information. The system is now online available at https://cfda.csie.org/RiskFinder/.