Common use of Research Challenges Clause in Contracts

Research Challenges. Several interesting research challenges continue to exist when building traditional efficient and effective IR systems (such as compression, first stage query resolution, and so on). In multi- stage retrieval systems the complexity is substantially higher and new areas need addressing. For example, at present we do not even know where and why these systems are slow. As mentioned above, exciting new challenges exist in the areas of conversational IR and learned data structures. While the notion of combining learning with efficient indexing is not an entirely new idea, recent advances in neural IR models have shown that learned data structures can in fact be faster, smaller, and as effective as their exact solution counterparts. However, enforc- ing performance guarantees in learned data structures is still a research problem requiring work. Likewise, as search becomes even more interactive, new opportunities for efficient indexing and ranking are emerging. For example, virtual assistants can leverage iterations on complex informa- tion in order to improve both effectiveness and efficiency in the interaction. But how to evaluate iterative changes for interactive search tasks is a significant challenge, and very few collections currently exist to test new approaches, let alone to test the end-to-end efficiency performance of such systems.