@inproceedings{jin-etal-2023-instructor,
title = "{I}nstructo{R}: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models",
author = "Jin, Zhuoran and
Cao, Pengfei and
Chen, Yubo and
Liu, Kang and
Zhao, Jun",
editor = "Bouamor, Houda and
Pino, Juan and
Bali, Kalika",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Singapore",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.443",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.443",
pages = "6649--6675",
abstract = "Compared to traditional single-turn ad-hoc retrieval, conversational retrieval needs to handle the multi-turn conversation and understand the user{'}s real query intent. However, most existing methods simply fine-tune the pre-trained ad-hoc retriever on limited supervised data, making it challenging for the retriever to fully grasp the entirety of the conversation. In this paper, we find that large language models (LLMs) can accurately discover the user{'}s query intent from the complex conversation context and provide the supervised signal to instruct the retriever in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method termed InstructoR to Instruct unsupervised conversational dense Retrieval with LLMs. We design an unsupervised training framework that employs LLMs to estimate the session-passage relevance score as the soft label to guide the retriever{'}s training. Specially, we devise three instructing strategies from context, query and response perspectives to calculate the relevance score more precisely, including conversational retrieval as conversation generation, question rewrite as latent variable and question response as posterior guide. Experimental results show InstructoR can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, even surpassing the current supervised state-of-the-art method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under low-resource and zero-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/InstructoR/.",
}
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<abstract>Compared to traditional single-turn ad-hoc retrieval, conversational retrieval needs to handle the multi-turn conversation and understand the user’s real query intent. However, most existing methods simply fine-tune the pre-trained ad-hoc retriever on limited supervised data, making it challenging for the retriever to fully grasp the entirety of the conversation. In this paper, we find that large language models (LLMs) can accurately discover the user’s query intent from the complex conversation context and provide the supervised signal to instruct the retriever in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method termed InstructoR to Instruct unsupervised conversational dense Retrieval with LLMs. We design an unsupervised training framework that employs LLMs to estimate the session-passage relevance score as the soft label to guide the retriever’s training. Specially, we devise three instructing strategies from context, query and response perspectives to calculate the relevance score more precisely, including conversational retrieval as conversation generation, question rewrite as latent variable and question response as posterior guide. Experimental results show InstructoR can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, even surpassing the current supervised state-of-the-art method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under low-resource and zero-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/InstructoR/.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T InstructoR: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models
%A Jin, Zhuoran
%A Cao, Pengfei
%A Chen, Yubo
%A Liu, Kang
%A Zhao, Jun
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y Pino, Juan
%Y Bali, Kalika
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
%D 2023
%8 December
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Singapore
%F jin-etal-2023-instructor
%X Compared to traditional single-turn ad-hoc retrieval, conversational retrieval needs to handle the multi-turn conversation and understand the user’s real query intent. However, most existing methods simply fine-tune the pre-trained ad-hoc retriever on limited supervised data, making it challenging for the retriever to fully grasp the entirety of the conversation. In this paper, we find that large language models (LLMs) can accurately discover the user’s query intent from the complex conversation context and provide the supervised signal to instruct the retriever in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method termed InstructoR to Instruct unsupervised conversational dense Retrieval with LLMs. We design an unsupervised training framework that employs LLMs to estimate the session-passage relevance score as the soft label to guide the retriever’s training. Specially, we devise three instructing strategies from context, query and response perspectives to calculate the relevance score more precisely, including conversational retrieval as conversation generation, question rewrite as latent variable and question response as posterior guide. Experimental results show InstructoR can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, even surpassing the current supervised state-of-the-art method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under low-resource and zero-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/InstructoR/.
%R 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.443
%U https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.443
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.443
%P 6649-6675
Markdown (Informal)
[InstructoR: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.443) (Jin et al., Findings 2023)
ACL