Related papers: RepBERT: Contextualized Text Embeddings for First-…

Term frequency is a common method for identifying the importance of a term in a query or document. But it is a weak signal, especially when the frequency distribution is flat, such as in long queries or short documents where the text is of…

In this work we leverage recent advances in context-sensitive language models to improve the task of query expansion. Contextualized word representation models, such as ELMo and BERT, are rapidly replacing static embedding models. We…

Efficient document retrieval heavily relies on the technique of semantic hashing, which learns a binary code for every document and employs Hamming distance to evaluate document distances. However, existing semantic hashing methods are…

Contextual embeddings, such as ELMo and BERT, move beyond global word representations like Word2Vec and achieve ground-breaking performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Contextual embeddings assign each word a…

Search engines rely heavily on term-based approaches that represent queries and documents as bags of words. Text---a document or a query---is represented by a bag of its words that ignores grammar and word order, but retains word frequency…

Pre-trained language models like BERT have achieved great success in a wide variety of NLP tasks, while the superior performance comes with high demand in computational resources, which hinders the application in low-latency IR systems. We…

Multi-vector retrieval methods, exemplified by the ColBERT architecture, have shown substantial promise for retrieval by providing strong trade-offs in terms of retrieval latency and effectiveness. However, they come at a high cost in terms…

Vector embeddings from pre-trained language models form a core component in Neural Information Retrieval systems across a multitude of knowledge extraction tasks. The paradigm of late interaction, introduced in ColBERT, demonstrates high…

Measuring the quality of a generated sequence against a set of references is a central problem in many learning frameworks, be it to compute a score, to assign a reward, or to perform discrimination. Despite great advances in model…

A fundamental goal of search engines is to identify, given a query, documents that have relevant text. This is intrinsically difficult because the query and the document may use different vocabulary, or the document may contain query words…

We consider the large-scale query-document retrieval problem: given a query (e.g., a question), return the set of relevant documents (e.g., paragraphs containing the answer) from a large document corpus. This problem is often solved in two…

The advent of contextualised language models has brought gains in search effectiveness, not just when applied for re-ranking the output of classical weighting models such as BM25, but also when used directly for passage indexing and…

Embedding-based retrieval (EBR) is a technique to use embeddings to represent query and document, and then convert the retrieval problem into a nearest neighbor search problem in the embedding space. Some previous works have mainly focused…

Language models that utilize extensive self-supervised pre-training from unlabeled text, have recently shown to significantly advance the state-of-the-art performance in a variety of language understanding tasks. However, it is yet unclear…

Representation learning is a critical ingredient for natural language processing systems. Recent Transformer language models like BERT learn powerful textual representations, but these models are targeted towards token- and sentence-level…

Word embeddings are effective intermediate representations for capturing semantic regularities between words, when learning the representations of text sequences. We propose to view text classification as a label-word joint embedding…

Neural networks provide new possibilities to automatically learn complex language patterns and query-document relations. Neural IR models have achieved promising results in learning query-document relevance patterns, but few explorations…

Similar question retrieval is a core task in community-based question answering (CQA) services. To balance the effectiveness and efficiency, the question retrieval system is typically implemented as multi-stage rankers: The first-stage…

We experiment with two recent contextualized word embedding methods (ELMo and BERT) in the context of open-domain argument search. For the first time, we show how to leverage the power of contextualized word embeddings to classify and…

Reranking, the process of refining the output of a first-stage retriever, is often considered computationally expensive, especially with Large Language Models. Borrowing from recent advances in document compression for RAG, we reduce the…