Related papers: Can Query Expansion Improve Generalization of Stro…

Bi-encoders and cross-encoders are widely used in many state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines. In this work we study the generalization ability of these two types of architectures on a wide range of parameter count on both in-domain and…

Query expansion is a method for alleviating the vocabulary mismatch problem present in information retrieval tasks. Previous works have shown that terms selected for query expansion by traditional methods such as pseudo-relevance feedback…

In monolingual dense retrieval, lots of works focus on how to distill knowledge from cross-encoder re-ranker to dual-encoder retriever and these methods achieve better performance due to the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-ranker.…

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such…

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query…

Reasoning-augmented search agents, such as Search-R1, are trained to reason, search, and generate the final answer iteratively. Nevertheless, due to their limited capabilities in reasoning and search, their performance on multi-hop QA…

Rerankers, typically cross-encoders, are computationally intensive but are frequently used because they are widely assumed to outperform cheaper initial IR systems. We challenge this assumption by measuring reranker performance for full…

An important problem in text-ranking systems is handling the hard queries that form the tail end of the query distribution. The difficulty may arise due to the presence of uncommon, underspecified, or incomplete queries. In this work, we…

Query expansion is a functionality of search engines that suggests a set of related queries for a user-issued keyword query. Typical corpus-driven keyword query expansion approaches return popular words in the results as expanded queries.…

Query expansion is the reformulation of a user query by adding semantically related information, and is an essential component of monolingual and cross-lingual information retrieval used to ensure that relevant documents are not missed.…

We propose EAR, a query Expansion And Reranking approach for improving passage retrieval, with the application to open-domain question answering. EAR first applies a query expansion model to generate a diverse set of queries, and then uses…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing dense retrieval through query augmentation. However, most existing methods treat the LLM and the retriever as separate modules, overlooking the alignment…

Pre-trained code models have emerged as the state-of-the-art paradigm for code search tasks. The paradigm involves pre-training the model on search-irrelevant tasks such as masked language modeling, followed by the fine-tuning stage, which…

State-of-the-art cross-encoders can be fine-tuned to be highly effective in passage re-ranking. The typical fine-tuning process of cross-encoders as re-rankers requires large amounts of manually labelled data, a contrastive learning…

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to consider multiple dimensions of relevance beyond topicality in cross-encoder re-ranking. On the one hand, current multidimensional retrieval models often use na\"ive solutions at the re-ranking…

Ranking consistently emerges as a primary focus in information retrieval research. Retrieval and ranking models serve as the foundation for numerous applications, including web search, open domain QA, enterprise domain QA, and text-based…

Effective cross-lingual dense retrieval methods that rely on multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) need to be trained to encompass both the relevance matching task and the cross-language alignment task. However, cross-lingual data…

Retrieval augmentation has shown promising improvements in different tasks. However, whether such augmentation can assist a large language model based re-ranker remains unclear. We investigate how to augment T5-based re-rankers using…

We present a comparative study between cross-encoder and LLMs rerankers in the context of re-ranking effective SPLADE retrievers. We conduct a large evaluation on TREC Deep Learning datasets and out-of-domain datasets such as BEIR and…

Query expansion aims to mitigate the mismatch between the language used in a query and in a document. However, query expansion methods can suffer from introducing non-relevant information when expanding the query. To bridge this gap,…