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Sean MacAvaney

5 accepted papers

2025

FollowIR: Evaluating and Teaching Information Retrieval Models to Follow Instructions

NAACL 2025long

Modern Language Models (LMs) are capable of following long and complex instructions that enable a large and diverse set of user requests. While Information Retrieval (IR) models use these LMs as the backbone of their architectures, virtually none of them allow users to provide detailed instructions…

2024

DyVo: Dynamic Vocabularies for Learned Sparse Retrieval with Entities

EMNLP 2024main

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models use vocabularies from pre-trained transformers, which often split entities into nonsensical fragments. Splitting entities diminishes retrieval accuracy and limits the model’s ability to incorporate up-to-date world knowledge not included in the training data. In…

2024

Exploiting Positional Bias for Query-Agnostic Generative Content in Search

ACL 2024findings

In recent years, research shows that neural ranking models (NRMs) substantially outperform their lexical counterparts in text retrieval. In traditional search pipelines, a combination of features leads to well-defined behaviour. However, as neural approaches become increasingly prevalent as the fina…

2024

The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2024poster

We have built TIREx, the information retrieval experiment platform, to promote standardized, reproducible, scalable, and blinded retrieval experiments. Standardization is achieved through integration with PyTerrier's interfaces and compatibility with ir_datasets and ir_measures. Reproducibility and…

2023

Effective Contrastive Weighting for Dense Query Expansion

ACL 2023long

Verbatim queries submitted to search engines often do not sufficiently describe the user’s search intent. Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) techniques, which modify a query’srepresentation using the top-ranked documents, have been shown to overcome such inadequacies and improve retrieval effectiveness…