Kshitij Fadnis

Avirup Sil, Jaydeep Sen, Bhavani Iyer et al. · ibm-research

The field of Question Answering (QA) has made remarkable progress in recent years, thanks to the advent of large pre-trained language models, newer realistic benchmark datasets with leaderboards, and novel algorithms for key components such as retrievers and readers. In this paper, we introduce PRIMEQA: a one-stop and open-source QA repository with an aim to democratize QA re-search and facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. PRIMEQA supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension as well as auxiliary capabilities such as question generation.It has been designed as an end-to-end toolkit for various use cases: building front-end applications, replicating SOTA methods on pub-lic benchmarks, and expanding pre-existing methods. PRIMEQA is available at : https://github.com/primeqa.

Maxwell Crouse, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Kshitij Fadnis et al. · ibm-research

Synthetic data has proven itself to be a valuable resource for tuning smaller, cost-effective language models to handle the complexities of multi-turn tool calling conversations. While many frameworks and systems for producing synthetic multi-turn tool calling data have been proposed, prior works have frequently assumed that any tool calling interactions will take place in an execution environment that maintains state. When such an environment is available, this is advantageous as it allows for the validity of an interaction to be determined by whether or not the state of the execution environment matches to some prespecified objective. Unfortunately, this does not hold in many real-world tool use settings, e.g., in enterprise settings where data security is of the utmost importance or in cases where tool specifications are synthesized from multiple sources. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a data generation method, DiGiT-TC, that is designed to produce tool calling conversations that have the characteristics of conversations generated through search in a stateful environment. The key to our technique lies in a novel generation pattern that allows our approach to implicitly represent certain tool calls in the user request. We validate our approach on standard tool calling benchmarks and demonstrate that, even in stateful problem settings, our approach results in strong performance gains.

Yannis Katsis, Sara Rosenthal, Kshitij Fadnis et al. · ibm-research

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently become a very popular task for Large Language Models (LLMs). Evaluating them on multi-turn RAG conversations, where the system is asked to generate a response to a question in the context of a preceding conversation is an important and often overlooked task with several additional challenges. We present MTRAG: an end-to-end human-generated multi-turn RAG benchmark that reflects several real-world properties across diverse dimensions for evaluating the full RAG pipeline. MTRAG contains 110 conversations averaging 7.7 turns each across four domains for a total of 842 tasks. We also explore automation paths via synthetic data and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our human and automatic evaluations show that even state-of-the-art LLM RAG systems struggle on MTRAG. We demonstrate the need for strong retrieval and generation systems that can handle later turns, unanswerable questions, non-standalone questions, and multiple domains. MTRAG is available at https://github.com/ibm/mt-rag-benchmark.

Kshitij Fadnis, Sara Rosenthal, Maeda Hanafi et al. · ibm-research

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is an important aspect of conversing with Large Language Models (LLMs) when factually correct information is important. LLMs may provide answers that appear correct, but could contain hallucinated information. Thus, building benchmarks that can evaluate LLMs on multi-turn RAG conversations has become an increasingly important task. Simulating real-world conversations is vital for producing high quality evaluation benchmarks. We present RAGAPHENE, a chat-based annotation platform that enables annotators to simulate real-world conversations for benchmarking and evaluating LLMs. RAGAPHENE has been successfully used by approximately 40 annotators to build thousands of real-world conversations.

Mayank Agarwal, Jorge J. Barroso, Tathagata Chakraborti et al.

This whitepaper reports on Project CLAI (Command Line AI), which aims to bring the power of AI to the command line interface (CLI). The CLAI platform sets up the CLI as a new environment for AI researchers to conquer by surfacing the command line as a generic environment that researchers can interface to using a simple sense-act API, much like the traditional AI agent architecture. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of the platform in detail, through illustrative use cases of new end user interaction patterns enabled by this design, and through quantitative evaluation of the system footprint of a CLAI-enabled terminal. We also report on some early user feedback on CLAI's features from an internal survey.

Kshitij Fadnis, Kartik Talamadupula, Pavan Kapanipathi et al.

In this paper, we introduce the problem of knowledge graph contextualization -- that is, given a specific NLP task, the problem of extracting meaningful and relevant sub-graphs from a given knowledge graph. The task in the case of this paper is the textual entailment problem, and the context is a relevant sub-graph for an instance of the textual entailment problem -- where given two sentences p and h, the entailment relationship between them has to be predicted automatically. We base our methodology on finding paths in a cost-customized external knowledge graph, and building the most relevant sub-graph that connects p and h. We show that our path selection mechanism to generate sub-graphs not only reduces noise, but also retrieves meaningful information from large knowledge graphs. Our evaluation shows that using information on entities as well as the relationships between them improves on the performance of purely text-based systems.

Pavan Kapanipathi, Veronika Thost, Siva Sankalp Patel et al.

Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Most approaches for solving the problem use only the textual content present in training data. A few approaches have shown that information from external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs) can add value, in addition to the textual content, by providing background knowledge that may be critical for a task. However, the proposed models do not fully exploit the information in the usually large and noisy KGs, and it is not clear how it can be effectively encoded to be useful for entailment. We present an approach that complements text-based entailment models with information from KGs by (1) using Personalized PageR- ank to generate contextual subgraphs with reduced noise and (2) encoding these subgraphs using graph convolutional networks to capture KG structure. Our technique extends the capability of text models exploiting structural and semantic information found in KGs. We evaluate our approach on multiple textual entailment datasets and show that the use of external knowledge helps improve prediction accuracy. This is particularly evident in the challenging BreakingNLI dataset, where we see an absolute improvement of 5-20% over multiple text-based entailment models.

Jatin Ganhotra, Siva Sankalp Patel, Kshitij Fadnis

Goal-oriented dialog systems, which can be trained end-to-end without manually encoding domain-specific features, show tremendous promise in the customer support use-case e.g. flight booking, hotel reservation, technical support, student advising etc. These dialog systems must learn to interact with external domain knowledge to achieve the desired goal e.g. recommending courses to a student, booking a table at a restaurant etc. This paper presents extended Enhanced Sequential Inference Model (ESIM) models: a) K-ESIM (Knowledge-ESIM), which incorporates the external domain knowledge and b) T-ESIM (Targeted-ESIM), which leverages information from similar conversations to improve the prediction accuracy. Our proposed models and the baseline ESIM model are evaluated on the Ubuntu and Advising datasets in the Sentence Selection track of the latest Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC7), where the goal is to find the correct next utterance, given a partial conversation, from a set of candidates. Our preliminary results suggest that incorporating external knowledge sources and leveraging information from similar dialogs leads to performance improvements for predicting the next utterance.