Most of the Natural Language Processing systems are involved in entity-based processing for several tasks like Information Extraction, Question-Answering, Text-Summarization and so on. A new challenge comes when entities play roles according to their act or attributes in certain context. Entity Role Detection is the task of assigning such roles to the entities. Usually real-world entities are of types: person, location and organization etc. Roles could be considered as domain-dependent subtypes of these types. In the cases, where retrieving a subset of entities based on their roles is needed, poses the problem of defining the role and entities having those roles. This paper presents the study of study of solving Entity Role Detection problem by modeling it as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Retrieval/Ranking task. In NER, these roles could be considered as mutually exclusive classes and standard NER methods like sequence tagging could be used. For Entity Retrieval, Roles could be formulated as Query and entities as Collection on which the query needs to be executed. The aspect of Entity Retrieval task, which is different than document retrieval task is that the entities and roles against which they need to be retrieved are indirectly described. We have formulated automated ways of learning representative words and phrases and building representations of roles and entities using them. We have also explored different contexts like sentence and document. Since the roles depend upon context, so it is not always possible to have large domain-specific dataset or knowledge bases for learning purposes, so we have tried to exploit the information from small dataset in domain-agnostic way.

Query optimization has been studied using machine learning, reinforcement learning, and, more recently, graph-based convolutional networks. Ontology, as a structured, information-rich knowledge representation, can provide context, particularly in learning problems. This paper presents OntoTune, an ontology-based platform for enhancing learning for query optimization. By connecting SQL queries, database metadata, and statistics, the ontology developed in this research is promising in capturing relationships and important determinants of query performance. This research also develops a method to embed ontologies while preserving as much of the relationships and key information as possible, before feeding it into learning algorithms such as tree-based and graph-based convolutional networks. A case study shows how OntoTune's ontology-driven learning delivers performance gains compared with database system default query execution.

Music language models (Music LMs), like vision language models, leverage mul-timodal representations to answer natural language queries about musical audio recordings. Although Music LMs are reportedly improving, we find that current evaluations fail to capture whether their answers are correct. Specifically, for all Music LMs that we examine, widely-used evaluation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and BERTScore fail to measure anything beyond linguistic fluency of the model's responses. To measure the true performance of Music LMs, we propose (1) a better general-purpose evaluation metric for Music LMs adapted to the music domain and (2) a factual evaluation framework to quantify the correctness of a Music LM's responses. Our framework is agnostic to the modality of the question-answering model and could be generalized to quantify performance in other open-ended question-answering domains. We use open datasets in our experiments and will release all code on publication. Music Language Models (Music LMs) are an emerging family of multimodal models that consume both language and audio as input. Music LMs are typically benchmarked with Natural Language Processing (NLP) metrics such as BERTScore (Zhang et al., 2020), which compare reference text with model outputs using a question-answering (QA) dataset, e.g., MusicQA. Prior work has identified that these metrics may be inadequate (Gardner et al., 2024; Lee & Lee, 2024; Zang et al., 2025), but they remain the predominant approach for evaluating Music LMs. In this work, we show that the standard NLP metrics used to assess Music LMs are not just inadequate; they fail to measure any ability of these models to extract information from audio. Specifically, we propose a baseline experiment that pairs each question in a Music QA dataset with a random, unrelated music recording from the dataset; this baseline tells us how a Music LM scores when it receives no useful information with which to answer the question; nevertheless, the standard NLP metrics judge outputs of this baseline to be equally good as when the correct music is provided. Furthermore, we show that adversarially crafted answers achieve very high scores under the standard metrics, despite being factually incorrect.

In this paper, we present a novel series of Russian information retrieval datasets constructed from the "Did you know..." section of Russian Wikipedia. Our datasets support a range of retrieval tasks, including fact-checking, retrieval-augmented generation, and full-document retrieval, by leveraging interesting facts and their referenced Wikipedia articles annotated at the sentence level with graded relevance. We describe the methodology for dataset creation that enables the expansion of existing Russian Information Retrieval (IR) resources. Through extensive experiments, we extend the RusBEIR research by comparing lexical retrieval models, such as BM25, with state-of-the-art neural architectures fine-tuned for Russian, as well as multilingual models. Results of our experiments show that lexical methods tend to outperform neural models on full-document retrieval, while neural approaches better capture lexical semantics in shorter texts, such as in fact-checking or fine-grained retrieval. Using our newly created datasets, we also analyze the impact of document length on retrieval performance and demonstrate that combining retrieval with neural reranking consistently improves results. Our contribution expands the resources available for Russian information retrieval research and highlights the importance of accurate evaluation of retrieval models to achieve optimal performance. All datasets are publicly available at HuggingFace. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, we also release the full implementation on GitHub.

As financial applications of large language models (LLMs) gain attention, accurate Information Retrieval (IR) remains crucial for reliable AI services. However, existing benchmarks fail to capture the complex and domain-specific information needs of real-world banking scenarios. Building domain-specific IR benchmarks is costly and constrained by legal restrictions on using real customer data. To address these challenges, we propose a systematic methodology for constructing domain-specific IR benchmarks through LLM-based query generation. As a concrete implementation of this methodology, our pipeline combines single and multi-document query generation with an enhanced and reasoning-augmented answerability assessment method, achieving stronger alignment with human judgments than prior approaches. Using this methodology, we construct KoBankIR, comprising 815 queries derived from 204 official banking documents. Our experiments show that existing retrieval models struggle with the complex multi-document queries in KoBankIR, demonstrating the value of our systematic approach for domain-specific benchmark construction and underscoring the need for improved retrieval techniques in financial domains.

Differentially private in-context learning (DP-ICL) has recently become an active research topic due to the inherent privacy risks of in-context learning. However, existing approaches overlook a critical component of modern large language model (LLM) pipelines: the similarity search used to retrieve relevant context data. In this work, we introduce a DP framework for in-context learning that integrates nearest neighbor search of relevant examples in a privacy-aware manner. Our method outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin across all evaluated benchmarks, achieving more favorable privacy-utility trade-offs. To achieve this, we employ nearest neighbor retrieval from a database of context data, combined with a privacy filter that tracks the cumulative privacy cost of selected samples to ensure adherence to a central differential privacy budget. Experimental results on text classification and document question answering show a clear advantage of the proposed method over existing baselines.

Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search retrieves the closest vectors for a query vector from a dataset. It enforces that a specified set of discrete labels $S$ for the query must be included in the labels of each retrieved vector. Existing graph-based methods typically incorporate filter awareness by assigning fixed penalties or prioritizing nodes based on filter satisfaction. However, since these methods use fixed, data in- dependent penalties, they often fail to generalize across datasets with diverse label and vector distributions. In this work, we propose a principled alternative that learns the optimal trade-off between vector distance and filter match directly from the data, rather than relying on fixed penalties. We formulate this as a constrained linear optimization problem, deriving weights that better reflect the underlying filter distribution and more effectively address the filtered ANN search problem. These learned weights guide both the search process and index construction, leading to graph structures that more effectively capture the underlying filter distribution and filter semantics. Our experiments demonstrate that adapting the distance function to the data significantly im- proves accuracy by 5-10% over fixed-penalty methods, providing a more flexible and generalizable framework for the filtered ANN search problem.

Training effective text rerankers is crucial for information retrieval. Two strategies are widely used: contrastive learning (optimizing directly on ground-truth labels) and knowledge distillation (transferring knowledge from a larger reranker). While both have been studied extensively, a clear comparison of their effectiveness for training cross-encoder rerankers under practical conditions is needed. This paper empirically compares these strategies by training rerankers of different sizes (0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B) and architectures (Transformer, Recurrent) using both methods on the same data, with a strong contrastive learning model acting as the distillation teacher. Our results show that knowledge distillation generally yields better in-domain and out-of-domain ranking performance than contrastive learning when distilling from a more performant teacher model. This finding is consistent across student model sizes and architectures. However, distilling from a teacher of the same capacity does not provide the same advantage, particularly for out-of-domain tasks. These findings offer practical guidance for choosing a training strategy based on available teacher models. We recommend using knowledge distillation to train smaller rerankers if a larger, more performant teacher is accessible; in its absence, contrastive learning remains a robust baseline. Our code implementation is made available to facilitate reproducbility.

The proliferation of unstructured data poses a fundamental challenge to traditional database interfaces. While Text-to-SQL has democratized access to structured data, it remains incapable of interpreting semantic or multi-modal queries. Concurrently, vector search has emerged as the de facto standard for querying unstructured data, but its integration with SQL-termed VectorSQL-still relies on manual query crafting and lacks standardized evaluation methodologies, creating a significant gap between its potential and practical application. To bridge this fundamental gap, we introduce and formalize Text2VectorSQL, a novel task to establish a unified natural language interface for seamlessly querying both structured and unstructured data. To catalyze research in this new domain, we present a comprehensive foundational ecosystem, including: (1) A scalable and robust pipeline for synthesizing high-quality Text-to-VectorSQL training data. (2) VectorSQLBench, the first large-scale, multi-faceted benchmark for this task, encompassing 12 distinct combinations across three database backends (SQLite, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse) and four data sources (BIRD, Spider, arXiv, Wikipedia). (3) Several novel evaluation metrics designed for more nuanced performance analysis. Extensive experiments not only confirm strong baseline performance with our trained models, but also reveal the recall degradation challenge: the integration of SQL filters with vector search can lead to more pronounced result omissions than in conventional filtered vector search. By defining the core task, delivering the essential data and evaluation infrastructure, and identifying key research challenges, our work lays the essential groundwork to build the next generation of unified and intelligent data interfaces. Our repository is available at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/Text2VectorSQL.

Most text retrievers generate one query vector to retrieve relevant documents. Y et, the conditional distribution of relevant documents for the query may be multi-modal, e.g., representing different interpretations of the query. We first quantify the limitations of existing retrievers. All retrievers we evaluate struggle more as the distance between target document embeddings grows. Our model autoregressively generates multiple query vectors, and all the predicted query vectors are used to retrieve documents from the corpus. We show that on the synthetic vectorized data, the proposed method could capture multiple target distributions perfectly, showing 4x better performance than single embedding model. We also fine-tune our model on real-world multi-answer retrieval datasets and evaluate in-domain. AMER presents 4 and 21% relative gains over single-embedding baselines on two datasets we evaluate on. Furthermore, we consistently observe larger gains on the subset of dataset where the embeddings of the target documents are less similar to each other. We demonstrate the potential of using a multi-query vector retriever and open up a new direction for future work. As large language models (LLMs) have limited, out-dated parametric knowledge, augmenting knowledge at inference time by prepending retrieved documents has risen as a de facto solution (Fan et al., 2024; Gao et al., 2023). Recovering a diverse set of documents is crucial to provide comprehensive information (Xu et al., 2023), as an answer providing partial information can be technically correct yet misleading to users. In this work, we study retrieving a diverse set of documents per query. We first analyze the behaviors of existing retrievers (Izacard et al., 2022; Y ang et al., 2025b; Zhang et al., 2025; Lee et al., 2025a) on datasets (Min et al., 2020; Amouyal et al., 2023) containing questions that admit multiple valid answers.