Related papers: On Approximate Nearest Neighbour Selection for Mul…
Inverted file structure is a common technique for accelerating dense retrieval. It clusters documents based on their embeddings; during searching, it probes nearby clusters w.r.t. an input query and only evaluates documents within them by…
Re-ranking utilizes contextual information to optimize the initial ranking list of person or vehicle re-identification (re-ID), which boosts the retrieval performance at post-processing steps. This paper proposes a re-ranking network to…
Expert search aims to find and rank experts based on a user's query. In academia, retrieving experts is an efficient way to navigate through a large amount of academic knowledge. Here, we study how different distributed representations of…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models have drawn considerable attention in modern open-domain question answering. The effectiveness of RAG depends on the quality of the top retrieved documents. However, conventional retrieval methods…
The ability to describe images with natural language sentences is the hallmark for image and language understanding. Such a system has wide ranging applications such as annotating images and using natural sentences to search for images.In…
Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) is a fundamental problem in databases and data mining. A scalable ANNS algorithm should be both memory-efficient and fast. Some early graph-based approaches have shown attractive theoretical…
Passage retrieval and ranking is a key task in open-domain question answering and information retrieval. Current effective approaches mostly rely on pre-trained deep language model-based retrievers and rankers. These methods have been shown…
Dense vector representations for textual data are crucial in modern NLP. Word embeddings and sentence embeddings estimated from raw texts are key in achieving state-of-the-art results in various tasks requiring semantic understanding.…
To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or…
Latent semantic representations of words or paragraphs, namely the embeddings, have been widely applied to information retrieval (IR). One of the common approaches of utilizing embeddings for IR is to estimate the document-to-query (D2Q)…
Dense embedding-based retrieval is widely used for semantic search and ranking. However, conventional two-stage approaches, involving contrastive embedding learning followed by approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS), can suffer from…
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…
Cross-encoder models, which jointly encode and score a query-item pair, are prohibitively expensive for direct k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search. Consequently, k-NN search typically employs a fast approximate retrieval (e.g. using BM25 or…
We demonstrate three approaches for adapting the open-source Lucene search library to perform approximate nearest-neighbor search on arbitrary dense vectors, using similarity search on word embeddings as a case study. At its core, Lucene is…
Approximate K Nearest Neighbor (AKNN) search in high-dimensional spaces is a critical yet challenging problem. In AKNN search, distance computation is the core task that dominates the runtime. Existing approaches typically use approximate…
Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are typically…
Nearest neighbor search is a very active field in machine learning for it appears in many application cases, including classification and object retrieval. In its canonical version, the complexity of the search is linear with both the…
We study the problem of approximate near neighbor (ANN) search and show the following results: - An improved framework for solving the ANN problem using locality-sensitive hashing, reducing the number of evaluations of locality-sensitive…
Finding semantically rich and computer-understandable representations for textual dialogues, utterances and words is crucial for dialogue systems (or conversational agents), as their performance mostly depends on understanding the context…
Search engines and recommendation systems are built to efficiently display relevant information from those massive amounts of candidates. Typically a three-stage mechanism is employed in those systems: (i) a small collection of items are…