Conversational search aims to retrieve passages containing essential information to answer queries in a multi-turn conversation. In conversational search, reformulating context-dependent conversational queries into stand-alone forms is imperative to effectively utilize off-the-shelf retrievers. Previous methodologies for conversational query reformulation frequently depend on human-annotated rewrites.However, these manually crafted queries often result in sub-optimal retrieval performance and require high collection costs.To address these challenges, we propose **Iter**ative **C**onversational **Q**uery **R**eformulation (**IterCQR**), a methodology that conducts query reformulation without relying on human rewrites. IterCQR iteratively trains the conversational query reformulation (CQR) model by directly leveraging information retrieval (IR) signals as a reward.Our IterCQR training guides the CQR model such that generated queries contain necessary information from the previous dialogue context.Our proposed method shows state-of-the-art performance on two widely-used datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness on both sparse and dense retrievers. Moreover, IterCQR exhibits superior performance in challenging settings such as generalization on unseen datasets and low-resource scenarios.

The problem of spurious programs is a longstanding challenge when training a semantic parser from weak supervision. To eliminate such programs that have wrong semantics but correct denotation, existing methods focus on exploiting similarities between examples based on domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic filtering mechanism based on program execution results. Specifically, for each program obtained through the search process, we first construct a representation that captures the program’s semantics as execution results under various inputs. Then, we run a majority vote on these representations to identify and filter out programs with significantly different semantics from the other programs. In particular, our method is orthogonal to the program search process so that it can easily augment any of the existing weakly supervised semantic parsing frameworks. Empirical evaluations on the Natural Language Visual Reasoning and WikiTableQuestions demonstrate that applying our method to the existing semantic parsers induces significantly improved performances.

Gender bias is a significant issue in machine translation, leading to ongoing research efforts in developing bias mitigation techniques. However, most works focus on debiasing bilingual models without much consideration for multilingual systems. In this paper, we specifically target the gender bias issue of multilingual machine translation models for unambiguous cases where there is a single correct translation, and propose a bias mitigation method based on a novel approach. Specifically, we propose Gender-Aware Contrastive Learning, GACL, which encodes contextual gender information into the representations of non-explicit gender words. Our method is target language-agnostic and is applicable to pre-trained multilingual machine translation models via fine-tuning. Through multilingual evaluation, we show that our approach improves gender accuracy by a wide margin without hampering translation performance. We also observe that incorporated gender information transfers and benefits other target languages regarding gender accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate that our method is applicable and beneficial to models of various sizes.

The goal of DSTC11 track 5 is to build task-oriented dialogue systems that can effectively utilize external knowledge sources such as FAQs and reviews. This year’s challenge differs from previous ones as it includes subjective knowledge snippets and requires multiple snippets for a single turn. We propose a pipeline system for the challenge focusing on entity tracking, knowledge selection and response generation. Specifically, we devise a novel heuristic to ensemble the outputs from the rule-based method and neural model for entity tracking and knowledge selection. We also leverage metadata information in the knowledge source to handle fine-grained user queries. Our approach achieved the first place in objective evaluation and the third place in human evaluation of DSTC11 track 5.