arXiv Computation and Language

GUIDE: Generative Unsupervised Chinese Query Correction via Phonetic and Visual Shared-ID Encoding

The paper introduces GUIDE, a generative unsupervised framework for Chinese query correction that uses shared-ID encoding for phonetically or visually confusable characters and an encoder–decoder architecture to reconstruct queries within plausible confusion neighborhoods. It incorporates a time‑decayed, query‑frequency‑weighted objective to adapt to rapidly changing query vocabularies. Experiments on QSpell 250K and the large‑scale KwaiSearch dataset demonstrate that GUIDE consistently outperforms strong baselines, with online A/B testing confirming improvements in correction quality and downstream engagement.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Low-Latency Spell Correction for Japanese Music Search Queries

The paper introduces a compact BART-based sequence‑to‑sequence model for low‑latency spell correction of Japanese music search queries, addressing challenges posed by four writing scripts. It employs a script‑aware synthetic misspelling pipeline that blends keyboard‑layout models, phonetic confusion priors, consonant alternations, and kana case errors, and normalizes mixed‑script titles to a single canonical script to reduce hallucinations. Experiments show the model achieves 41.09% exact‑match accuracy and 11.62% CER, outperforming edit‑distance baselines while keeping inference latency under 4 ms on a single GPU.

By Anshul Garg, Pavni Tandon, Karan Bhukar, Tanmay Khandelwal, Ujjal Kumar Dutta
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Tracing and Taming Hallucinated Terms via Subsequence-Association Filtering and Breadth-Aware Selection for LLM Query Expansion

The paper introduces SAFE‑QE, a training‑free, retriever‑agnostic method for query expansion that mitigates hallucinated terms from large language models. It uses a subsequence‑association filter to score candidate terms based on their reproducibility across randomised query contexts, down‑weighting terms that lack corpus support. SAFE‑QE then selects a broad yet consistent set of expansions via constrained coverage maximisation, and defines a new metric, the Hallucinated Expansion Term Rate, to quantify faithfulness. The approach matches state‑of‑the‑art ranking performance while injecting far fewer unsupported terms on TREC and BEIR benchmarks.

By Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Sagar Uprety, Prayag Tiwari
arXiv AI
5d ago

What the Query Remembers: Query Abstraction Governs Lexical and Dense Retrieval of Classical Arabic Poetry

The study investigates how the remembered content of a user’s query influences retrieval performance for Classical Arabic poetry. By benchmarking nine dense encoders and BM25 across two corpora, three indexing modes, and two evaluation protocols, it finds that BM25 excels on tip‑of‑the‑tongue queries but ranks eighth on abstract queries, while dense encoders outperform BM25 on the latter. The results show that adding remembered half‑verses boosts BM25 dramatically, and that the choice of retrieval protocol can significantly alter perceived system effectiveness.

By Omar Farouk Zouak, Selma Mani, Larbi Said Chikh, Raid Abderrezak Ouahioune
arXiv AI
Oct 23

A Small Model Asks Better: Fine-Tuning Query Clarification for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces ClariEdge, a dataset of about 3,900 examples that capture ambiguous or ill‑formed user queries in retrieval‑augmented generation contexts, including negative cases that do not need clarification. A lightweight LoRA fine‑tuned model achieves 96.6% classification accuracy, outperforming larger prompted baselines in both classification and clarification generation. The study highlights the importance of hard negatives for distinguishing truly ambiguous queries and demonstrates that the same model can be applied before and after retrieval in a RAG pipeline.

By Lihong He, Lucian Popa, Marina Danilevsky
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Dense Retrieval with Query Likelihood Modeling

The paper introduces LLM-QL, a dense retrieval model that harnesses large language models (LLMs) by maximizing query likelihood (QL) as an auxiliary task. It incorporates an Attention Block to limit predictive token attention to document tokens before the ending token and a Document Corruption component that masks parts of the document during prediction. Experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR datasets show that LLM-QL outperforms other LLM-based retrievers, and detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components.

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Xiaojie Sun, Shihao Liu, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv AI
Aug 19

DEPT: Document Embedding Preservation Tuning for Unified Query Expansion and Retrieval

The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.

By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv AI
3d ago

Latent Abstraction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces LAnR (Latent Abstraction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a unified framework where a single large language model jointly encodes, retrieves, and generates within its latent space. Instead of generating natural language queries, LAnR produces dense retrieval vectors from a designated [PRED] token and matches them against encoded document representations from the same model. An adaptive MLP control head decides when sufficient evidence has been retrieved, eliminating the need for a separate retriever and explicit token-level stopping reasoning. Experiments on six QA benchmarks show that LAnR outperforms existing RAG methods while improving inference efficiency by reducing retrieval calls and tightening model integration.

By Ha Lan N. T, Minh-Anh Nguyen, Dung D. Le
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Linguistic Loopholes in LLM Unlearning: From a 174-Language Benchmark to Coverage-Aware Unlearning

The paper introduces the problem of cross‑lingual loopholes in large language model (LLM) unlearning, where forgetting a fact in one language can leave it accessible in others. It presents a new 174‑language benchmark, the Cross‑Lingual Unlearning Tensor, and proposes COVER, a method that selects a subset of source languages to maximize unlearning coverage under a language budget. Experiments show COVER reduces residual knowledge by 7.8–27.3% compared to uniform selection and works on both synthetic and real low‑resource news data.

By Tyler Skow, Shravan Chaudhari, Rama Chellappa, Abhay Yadav