Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association

Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Jiangnan Li, Mo Yu, Fandong Meng, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, Jie Zhou


Abstract
Retrieving relevant plots from the book for a query is a critical task, which can improve the reading experience and efficiency of readers. Readers usually only give an abstract and vague description as the query based on their own understanding, summaries, or speculations of the plot, which requires the retrieval model to have a strong ability to estimate the abstract semantic associations between the query and candidate plots. However, existing information retrieval (IR) datasets cannot reflect this ability well. In this paper, we propose PlotRetrieval, a labeled dataset to train and evaluate the performance of IR models on the novel task Plot Retrieval. Text pairs in PlotRetrieval have less word overlap and more abstract semantic association, which can reflect the ability of the IR models to estimate the abstract semantic association, rather than just traditional lexical or semantic matching. Extensive experiments across various lexical retrieval, sparse retrieval, dense retrieval, and cross-encoder methods compared with human studies on PlotRetrieval show current IR models still struggle in capturing abstract semantic association between texts. PlotRetrieval can be the benchmark for further research on the semantic association modeling ability of IR models.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-srw.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Xiyan Fu, Eve Fleisig
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
146–161
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Jiangnan Li, Mo Yu, Fandong Meng, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, and Jie Zhou. 2024. Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 146–161, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association (Xu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.14.pdf