Papers by Jinhyuk Lee

15 papers
When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIR (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Dense retrievers encode text into embeddings to retrieve relevant documents . however, real-world corpora evolve, resulting in degraded retrieval performance . identifying when a dense retriever requires an update is critical for robust retrieval systems .
Approach: They propose a task of predicting whether a corpus is out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to a dense retriever before indexing.
Outcome: The proposed method detects whether a corpus is out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to a dense retriever before indexing.
Ranking Paragraphs for Improving Answer Recall in Open-Domain Question Answering (D18-1)

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Challenge: Recent work has combined open-domain question answering with machine comprehension models to find answers in a large knowledge source.
Approach: They propose a machine comprehension model that ranks paragraphs of retrieved documents for a higher answer recall with less noise.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on four open-domain QA datasets by 7.8% on average.
Learning Dense Representations of Phrases at Scale (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing phrase retrieval models rely on sparse representations and still underperform retriever-reader approaches.
Approach: They propose a method to learn phrase representations from reading comprehension tasks using negative sampling methods.
Outcome: The proposed model improves over previous models by 15%-25% absolute accuracy and matches the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models.
Real-Time Open-Domain Question Answering with Dense-Sparse Phrase Index (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing open-domain question answering models require multiple documents on-demand for every input query.
Approach: They propose query-agnostic indexable representations of document phrases that can drastically speed up open-domain question answering.
Outcome: The proposed model can be trained and deployed even in a single 4-GPU server.
Simple Entity-Centric Questions Challenge Dense Retrievers (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Open-domain question answering has exploded in popularity due to the success of dense retrieval models.
Approach: They construct a set of simple, entity-rich questions based on facts from Wikidata and test their models against supervised datasets.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms sparse retrieval methods on open-domain question answering datasets by a large margin.
LOFT: Scalable and More Realistic Long-Context Evaluation (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Long-context language models (LCLMs) can be used to perform tasks traditionally reliant on external tools like retrieval systems or databases.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LCLMs' performance on in-context retrieval and reasoning tasks using a set of tokens.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG systems on in-context retrieval tasks while still requiring prompting strategies.
Bridging the Training-Inference Gap for Dense Phrase Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for building dense retrievers are often misaligned and do not reflect retrieval scenario at inference time.
Approach: They propose a way to validate dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus.
Outcome: The proposed model improves top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2 3 points and top-20 passage retrieval by 2 4 points for open-domain question answering.
Adversarial Subword Regularization for Robust Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for segmenting words into subword units are not robust enough to handle multiple subword candidates.
Approach: They propose to regularize subword segmentations that maximize the translation loss by using gradient signals during training to prevent erroneous segmentations of unseen words.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of NMT models on low-resource and out-domain datasets.
Simple Questions Generate Named Entity Recognition Datasets (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent named entity recognition models rely on human-annotated datasets . however, in-domain dictionaries and sentences are often unavailable or expensive to construct for many entity types.
Approach: They propose an ask-to-generate approach which automatically generates NER datasets by asking natural language questions to an open-domain question answering system.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the previous best model by 19.5 F1 score on six benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Phrase Retrieval Learns Passage Retrieval, Too (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Dense retrieval methods have shown great promise over sparse methods in a range of NLP problems.
Approach: They propose to use dense phrase retrieval to learn coarse-level retrieval including passages . they show phrase retrievals can be fine-tuned for more coarse-grained retrieval units .
Outcome: The proposed method improves passage retrieval accuracy and QA performance with fewer passages.
Contextualized Sparse Representations for Real-Time Open-Domain Question Answering (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing phrase retrieval models suffer from low accuracy due to limited scalability and speed . 'Open-domain question answering' is a task of answering generic factoid questions by looking up a large knowledge source, typically unstructured text corpora such as Wikipedia.
Approach: They aim to augment existing phrase retrieval models with contextualized sparse representations to improve the quality of each phrase embedding.
Outcome: The proposed model improves CuratedTREC and SQuAD-Open by 4% and 45x faster inference speeds over the existing model.
Can Language Models be Biomedical Knowledge Bases? (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on probing LMs in the general domain but little attention has been given to whether they can be used as domain knowledge bases.
Approach: They propose to use 49K biomedical factual knowledge triples to probe LMs for biomedically . they find that biomedic LM can achieve up to 18.51% Acc@5 on retrieving biomedcial knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed biomedical factual knowledge probing benchmark achieves 18.51% Acc@5 on biomedically-relevant knowledge retrieval.
Optimizing Test-Time Query Representations for Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent developments of dense retrieval rely on quality representations of queries and contexts from pre-trained query and context encoders.
Approach: They propose a test-time optimization of query representations that provides fine-grained pseudo labels over retrieval results.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm improves open-domain question answering accuracy and direct re-ranking by up to 2.0% while running 1.3–2.4x faster with an efficient implementation.
Biomedical Entity Representations with Synonym Marginalization (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Biomedical named entities are often used as key features in biomedical text mining.
Approach: They propose to use a model-based candidate selection to maximize the marginal likelihood of the synonyms present in top candidates.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on four biomedical entity normalization datasets with three different entity types.
Look at the First Sentence: Position Bias in Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Extractive question answering models are trained to predict start and end positions of answers . recent QA models outperform humans in some datasets due to their simplicity and effectiveness.
Approach: They propose to use prior distribution of answer positions as a bias model to reduce position bias.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms BERT from 37.48% to 81.64% when trained on a biased SQUAD dataset.

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