Disentangling Questions from Query Generation for Task-Adaptive Retrieval

Yoonsang Lee, Minsoo Kim, Seung-won Hwang


Abstract
This paper studies the problem of information retrieval, to adapt to unseen tasks. Existing work generates synthetic queries from domain-specific documents to jointly train the retriever. However, the conventional query generator assumes the query as a question, thus failing to accommodate general search intents. A more lenient approach incorporates task-adaptive elements, such as few-shot learning with an 137B LLM. In this paper, we challenge a trend equating query and question, and instead conceptualize query generation task as a “compilation” of high-level intent into task-adaptive query. Specifically, we propose EGG, a query generator that better adapts to wide search intents expressed in the BeIR benchmark. Our method outperforms baselines and existing models on four tasks with underexplored intents, while utilizing a query generator 47 times smaller than the previous state-of-the-art. Our findings reveal that instructing the LM with explicit search intent is a key aspect of modeling an effective query generator.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.274
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4775–4785
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.274
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yoonsang Lee, Minsoo Kim, and Seung-won Hwang. 2024. Disentangling Questions from Query Generation for Task-Adaptive Retrieval. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 4775–4785, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Disentangling Questions from Query Generation for Task-Adaptive Retrieval (Lee et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.274.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.274.software.zip