论文标题
插值或不插入:PRF,致密和稀疏的猎犬
To Interpolate or not to Interpolate: PRF, Dense and Sparse Retrievers
论文作者
论文摘要
当前的预训练的信息检索方法可以将其广泛分为两类:稀疏的检索器(属于非神经方法的方法,例如单词袋方法,例如BM25)和密集的回收者。这些类别中的每一个似乎都捕获了相关性的不同特征。先前的工作已经调查了如何通过插值将稀疏回收者的相关性信号与密集回收者的相关性相结合。这种插值通常会导致更高的检索有效性。在本文中,我们考虑了在伪相关反馈(PRF)的背景下将相关性信号结合起来的问题。此上下文提出了两个关键挑战:(1)何时应发生插值:PRF过程前,之后或之后? (2)应该考虑哪些稀疏表示:零射袋型号(BM25)或学习的稀疏表示形式?为了回答这些问题,我们考虑了一种有效且可扩展的神经PRF方法(Vector-PRF),三个有效的密集检索器(ANCE,TCTV2,Distillbert)和一名先进的稀疏回收者(UNICOIL),我们进行了彻底的经验评估。我们实验的经验发现表明,无论稀疏表示和稠密的猎犬,PRF之前和之后的插值都达到了大多数数据集和指标的最高有效性。
Current pre-trained language model approaches to information retrieval can be broadly divided into two categories: sparse retrievers (to which belong also non-neural approaches such as bag-of-words methods, e.g., BM25) and dense retrievers. Each of these categories appears to capture different characteristics of relevance. Previous work has investigated how relevance signals from sparse retrievers could be combined with those from dense retrievers via interpolation. Such interpolation would generally lead to higher retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we consider the problem of combining the relevance signals from sparse and dense retrievers in the context of Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF). This context poses two key challenges: (1) When should interpolation occur: before, after, or both before and after the PRF process? (2) Which sparse representation should be considered: a zero-shot bag-of-words model (BM25), or a learnt sparse representation? To answer these questions we perform a thorough empirical evaluation considering an effective and scalable neural PRF approach (Vector-PRF), three effective dense retrievers (ANCE, TCTv2, DistillBERT), and one state-of-the-art learnt sparse retriever (uniCOIL). The empirical findings from our experiments suggest that, regardless of sparse representation and dense retriever, interpolation both before and after PRF achieves the highest effectiveness across most datasets and metrics.