Recently, Nogueira et al. [2019] proposed a new approach to document expansion based on a neural Seq2Seq model, showing significant improvement on short text retrieval task. However, this approach needs a large amount of in-domain training data. In this paper, we show that this neural document expansion approach can be effectively adapted to standard IR tasks, where labels are scarce and many long documents are present.
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science（戴维·R·切里顿计算机科学学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Following recent successes in applying BERT to question answering, we explore simple applications to ad hoc document retrieval. This required confronting the challenge posed by documents that are typically longer than the length of input BERT was designed to handle. We address this issue by applying inference on sentences individually, and then aggregating sentence scores to produce document scores. Experiments on TREC microblog and newswire test collections show that our approach is simple yet effective, as we report the highest average precision on these datasets by neural approaches that we…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；SAP SE（SAP公司）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is commonly used to boost the performance of traditional information retrieval (IR) models by using top-ranked documents to identify and weight new query terms, thereby reducing the effect of query-document vocabulary mismatches. While neural retrieval models have recently demonstrated strong results for ad-hoc retrieval, combining them with PRF is not straightforward due to incompatibilities between existing PRF approaches and neural architectures. To bridge this gap, we propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models …
Evaluating Generative Ad Hoc Information Retrieval
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Bauhaus-Universität Weimar（魏玛包豪斯大学）；Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena（弗里德里希·席勒大学耶拿分校）；University of Kassel（卡塞尔大学）
Most previous work on the recently developed language-modeling approach to information retrieval focuses on document-specific characteristics, and therefore does not take into account the structure of the surrounding corpus. We propose a novel algorithmic framework in which information provided by document-based language models is enhanced by the incorporation of information drawn from clusters of similar documents. Using this framework, we develop a suite of new algorithms. Even the simplest typically outperforms the standard language-modeling approach in precision and recall, and our new int…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
HC4 is a new suite of test collections for ad hoc Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), with Common Crawl News documents in Chinese, Persian, and Russian, topics in English and in the document languages, and graded relevance judgments. New test collections are needed because existing CLIR test collections built using pooling of traditional CLIR runs have systematic gaps in their relevance judgments when used to evaluate neural CLIR methods. The HC4 collections contain 60 topics and about half a million documents for each of Chinese and Persian, and 54 topics and five million documents f…
Complex deep learning models now achieve state of the art performance for many document retrieval tasks. The best models process the query or claim jointly with the document. However for fast scalable search it is desirable to have document embeddings which are independent of the claim. In this paper we show that knowledge distillation can be used to encourage a model that generates claim independent document encodings to mimic the behavior of a more complex model which generates claim dependent encodings. We explore this approach in document retrieval for a fact extraction and verification ta…
MARA: A Multimodal Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Document Question Answering
Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT), AIRI, CAS（目标认知与应用技术重点实验室（TCAT），空气动力研究所，中国科学院）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, UCAS（电子、电气与通信工程学院，中国科学院大学）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（航天信息研究所，中国科学院）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
Document retrieval enables users to find their required documents accurately and quickly. To satisfy the requirement of retrieval efficiency, prevalent deep neural methods adopt a representation-based matching paradigm, which saves online matching time by pre-storing document representations offline. However, the above paradigm consumes vast local storage space, especially when storing the document as word-grained representations. To tackle this, we present TGTR, a Topic-Grained Text Representation-based Model for document retrieval. Following the representation-based matching paradigm, TGTR s…
Graph neural networks (GNNs), as a group of powerful tools for representation learning on irregular data, have manifested superiority in various downstream tasks. With unstructured texts represented as concept maps, GNNs can be exploited for tasks like document retrieval. Intrigued by how can GNNs help document retrieval, we conduct an empirical study on a large-scale multi-discipline dataset CORD-19. Results show that instead of the complex structure-oriented GNNs such as GINs and GATs, our proposed semantics-oriented graph functions achieve better and more stable performance based on the BM2…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Long document retrieval aims to fetch query-relevant documents from a large-scale collection, where knowledge distillation has become de facto to improve a retriever by mimicking a heterogeneous yet powerful cross-encoder. However, in contrast to passages or sentences, retrieval on long documents suffers from the scope hypothesis that a long document may cover multiple topics. This maximizes their structure heterogeneity and poses a granular-mismatch issue, leading to an inferior distillation efficacy. In this work, we propose a new learning framework, fine-grained distillation (FGD), for long…
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Recently, Dense Retrieval (DR) has become a promising solution to document retrieval, where document representations are used to perform effective and efficient semantic search. However, DR remains challenging on long documents, due to the quadratic complexity of its Transformer-based encoder and the finite capacity of a low-dimension embedding. Current DR models use suboptimal strategies such as truncating or splitting-and-pooling to long documents leading to poor utilization of whole document information. In this work, to tackle this problem, we propose Segment representation learning for lo…
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学戴维·R·切里顿计算机科学学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学计算机科学与工程系）
Dense retrieval has shown great success in passage ranking in English. However, its effectiveness in document retrieval for non-English languages remains unexplored due to the limitation in training resources. In this work, we explore different transfer techniques for document ranking from English annotations to multiple non-English languages. Our experiments on the test collections in six languages (Chinese, Arabic, French, Hindi, Bengali, Spanish) from diverse language families reveal that zero-shot model-based transfer using mBERT improves the search quality in non-English mono-lingual retr…
A Large Language Model-based Framework for Semi-Structured Tender Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation
School of Information Management Sun Yat-sen University Guangzhou, China；School of Information Management Sun Yat-sen University Guangzhou, China corresponding author
LS2N, Université de Nantes（南特大学LS2N实验室）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Sequence-to-sequence models have lead to significant progress in keyphrase generation, but it remains unknown whether they are reliable enough to be beneficial for document retrieval. This study provides empirical evidence that such models can significantly improve retrieval performance, and introduces a new extrinsic evaluation framework that allows for a better understanding of the limitations of keyphrase generation models. Using this framework, we point out and discuss the difficulties encountered with supplementing documents with -- not present in text -- keyphrases, and generalizing mode…
Recent work has shown the surprising ability of multi-lingual BERT to serve as a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer model for a number of language processing tasks. We combine this finding with a similarly-recently proposal on sentence-level relevance modeling for document retrieval to demonstrate the ability of multi-lingual BERT to transfer models of relevance across languages. Experiments on test collections in five different languages from diverse language families (Chinese, Arabic, French, Hindi, and Bengali) show that models trained with English data improve ranking quality, without any sp…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Meituan（美团）
Recently, the retrieval models based on dense representations have been gradually applied in the first stage of the document retrieval tasks, showing better performance than traditional sparse vector space models. To obtain high efficiency, the basic structure of these models is Bi-encoder in most cases. However, this simple structure may cause serious information loss during the encoding of documents since the queries are agnostic. To address this problem, we design a method to mimic the queries on each of the documents by an iterative clustering process and represent the documents by multipl…
The primary goal of ad-hoc retrieval (document retrieval in the context of question answering) is to find relevant documents satisfied the information need posted in a natural language query. It requires a good understanding of the query and all the documents in a corpus, which is difficult because the meaning of natural language texts depends on the context, syntax,and semantics. Recently deep neural networks have been used to rank search results in response to a query. In this paper, we devise a multi-resolution neural network(MRNN) to leverage the whole hierarchy of representations for docu…
University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；University of London（伦敦大学）
Domain specific information retrieval process has been a prominent and ongoing research in the field of natural language processing. Many researchers have incorporated different techniques to overcome the technical and domain specificity and provide a mature model for various domains of interest. The main bottleneck in these studies is the heavy coupling of domain experts, that makes the entire process to be time consuming and cumbersome. In this study, we have developed three novel models which are compared against a golden standard generated via the on line repositories provided, specificall…
Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Alibaba Cloud Computing（阿里云计算）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
State-of-the-art systems in deep question answering proceed as follows: (1) an initial document retrieval selects relevant documents, which (2) are then processed by a neural network in order to extract the final answer. Yet the exact interplay between both components is poorly understood, especially concerning the number of candidate documents that should be retrieved. We show that choosing a static number of documents -- as used in prior research -- suffers from a noise-information trade-off and yields suboptimal results. As a remedy, we propose an adaptive document retrieval model. This lea…
DAPR: A Benchmark on Document-Aware Passage Retrieval
Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Cohere；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心）；Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab)（普适知识处理实验室）
This paper challenges a cross-genre document retrieval task, where the queries are in formal writing and the target documents are in conversational writing. In this task, a query, is a sentence extracted from either a summary or a plot of an episode in a TV show, and the target document consists of transcripts from the corresponding episode. To establish a strong baseline, we employ the current state-of-the-art search engine to perform document retrieval on the dataset collected for this work. We then introduce a structure reranking approach to improve the initial ranking by utilizing syntacti…
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology（台湾科技大学）
Recent developments in deep learning have led to a significant innovation in various classic and practical subjects, including speech recognition, computer vision, question answering, information retrieval and so on. In the context of natural language processing (NLP), language representations have shown giant successes in many downstream tasks, so the school of studies have become a major stream of research recently. Because the immenseness of multimedia data along with speech have spread around the world in our daily life, spoken document retrieval (SDR) has become an important research subj…
A key component of fact verification is thevevidence retrieval, often from multiple documents. Recent approaches use dense representations and condition the retrieval of each document on the previously retrieved ones. The latter step is performed over all the documents in the collection, requiring storing their dense representations in an index, thus incurring a high memory footprint. An alternative paradigm is retrieve-and-rerank, where documents are retrieved using methods such as BM25, their sentences are reranked, and further documents are retrieved conditioned on these sentences, reducing…
Lost in a Single Vector: Improving Long-Document Retrieval with Chunk Evidence Aggregation
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；State Key Laboratory of AI Safety（人工智能安全国家重点实验室）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Pretrained language models have improved effectiveness on numerous tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval. Recent work has shown that continuing to pretrain a language model with auxiliary objectives before fine-tuning on the retrieval task can further improve retrieval effectiveness. Unlike monolingual retrieval, designing an appropriate auxiliary task for cross-language mappings is challenging. To address this challenge, we use comparable Wikipedia articles in different languages to further pretrain off-the-shelf multilingual pretrained models before fine-tuning on the retrieval task. We show tha…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国高等科学技术院）
Dense retrieval models, which aim at retrieving the most relevant document for an input query on a dense representation space, have gained considerable attention for their remarkable success. Yet, dense models require a vast amount of labeled training data for notable performance, whereas it is often challenging to acquire query-document pairs annotated by humans. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective Document Augmentation for dense Retrieval (DAR) framework, which augments the representations of documents with their interpolation and perturbation. We validate the performan…
The popular approaches to recommendation and ad-hoc retrieval tasks are largely distinct in the literature. In this work, we argue that many recommendation problems can also be cast as ad-hoc retrieval tasks. To demonstrate this, we build a solution for the RecSys 2018 Spotify challenge by combining standard ad-hoc retrieval models and using popular retrieval tools sets. We draw a parallel between the playlist continuation task and the task of finding good expansion terms for queries in ad-hoc retrieval, and show that standard pseudo-relevance feedback can be effective as a collaborative filte…
