Avishek Anand – författare

Question answering (QA) systems on the Web try to provide crisp answers to information needs posed in natural language, replacing the traditional ranked list of documents. QA, posing a multitude of research challenges, has emerged as one of the most actively investigated topics in information retrieval, natural language processing, and the artificial intelligence communities today. The flip side of such diverse and active interest is that publications are highly fragmented across several venues in the above communities, making it very difficult for new entrants to the field to get a good overview of the topic. Through this book, we make an attempt towards mitigating the above problem by providing an overview of the state-of-the-art in question answering. We cover the twin paradigms of curated Web sources used in QA tasks ‒ trusted text collections like Wikipedia, and objective information distilled into large-scale knowledge bases. We discuss distinct methodologies that have been applied to solve the QA problem in both these paradigms, using instantiations of recent systems for illustration. We begin with an overview of the problem setup and evaluation, cover notable sub-topics like open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational QA in depth, and conclude with key insights and emerging topics. We believe that this resource is a valuable contribution towards a unified view on QA, helping graduate students and researchers planning to work on this topic in the near future.

Question answering (QA) systems on the Web try to provide crisp answers to information needs posed in natural language, replacing the traditional ranked list of documents. QA, posing a multitude of research challenges, has emerged as one of the most actively investigated topics in information retrieval, natural language processing, and the artificial intelligence communities today. The flip side of such diverse and active interest is that publications are highly fragmented across several venues in the above communities, making it very difficult for new entrants to the field to get a good overview of the topic. Through this book, we make an attempt towards mitigating the above problem by providing an overview of the state-of-the-art in question answering. We cover the twin paradigms of curated Web sources used in QA tasks ‒ trusted text collections like Wikipedia, and objective information distilled into large-scale knowledge bases. We discuss distinct methodologies that have been applied to solve the QA problem in both these paradigms, using instantiations of recent systems for illustration. We begin with an overview of the problem setup and evaluation, cover notable sub-topics like open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational QA in depth, and conclude with key insights and emerging topics. We believe that this resource is a valuable contribution towards a unified view on QA, helping graduate students and researchers planning to work on this topic in the near future.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.

The four-volume set LNCS 16483-16486 constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, during March 29–April 2, 2026.The 46 full papers and 37 short papers presented together with 10 findings papers, 9 reproducibility papers, 17 resource papers, 11 workshop papers, 7 tutorial papers, 19 IR4Good papers, 13 demo papers, 14 doctoral consortium papers, 10 industry track papers, and 16 CLEF overview papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 530 submissions.The papers were organized in the four volumes as follows: Volume 1: Full Papers Volume 2: Full Papers and Short PapersVolume 3: Reproducibility Papers, Workshop Papers, IR for Good papers, and Doctoral Consortium PapersVolume 4: Tutorial Papers, Industry Papers, Demo Papers, CLEF Overview Papers, and Resource Papers.