Existing passage retrieval systems typically adopt a two-stage retrieve-then-rerank pipeline. To obtain an effective reranking model, many prior works have focused on improving the model architectures, such as leveraging powerful pretrained large language models (LLM) and designing better objective functions. However, less attention has been paid to the issue of collecting high-quality training data. In this paper, we propose HYRR, a framework for training robust reranking models. Specifically, we propose a simple but effective approach to select training data using hybrid retrievers. Our experiments show that the rerankers trained with HYRR are robust to different first-stage retrievers. Moreover, evaluations using MS MARCO and BEIR data sets demonstrate our proposed framework effectively generalizes to both supervised and zero-shot retrieval settings.

We develop and evaluate multilingual scientific documents similarity measurement models in this work. Such models can be used to find related papers in different languages, which can help multilingual researchers find and explore papers more efficiently. We propose the first multilingual scientific documents dataset, Open-access Multilingual Scientific Documents (OpenMSD), which has 74M papers in 103 languages and 778M citation pairs. With OpenMSD, we develop multilingual SDSM models by adjusting and extending the state-of-the-art methods designed for English SDSM tasks. We find that: (i)Some highly successful methods in English SDSM yield significantly worse performance in multilingual SDSM. (ii)Our best model, which enriches the non-English papers with English summaries, outperforms strong baselines by 7% (in mean average precision) on multilingual SDSM tasks, without compromising the performance on English SDSM tasks.

The availability of large, high-quality datasets has been a major driver of recent progress in question answering (QA). Such annotated datasets, however, are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English, rendering QA technology inaccessible to underrepresented languages. An alternative to building large monolingual training datasets is to leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs) under a few-shot learning setting. Our approach, QAmeleon, uses a PLM to automatically generate multilingual data upon which QA models are fine-tuned, thus avoiding costly annotation. Prompt tuning the PLM with only five examples per language delivers accuracy superior to translation-based baselines; it bridges nearly 60% of the gap between an English-only baseline and a fully-supervised upper bound fine-tuned on almost 50,000 hand-labeled examples; and consistently leads to improvements compared to directly fine-tuning a QA model on labeled examples in low resource settings. Experiments on the TyDiqa-GoldP and MLQA benchmarks show that few-shot prompt tuning for data synthesis scales across languages and is a viable alternative to large-scale annotation.1

It has been shown that dual encoders trained on one domain often fail to generalize to other domains for retrieval tasks. One widespread belief is that the bottleneck layer of a dual encoder, where the final score is simply a dot-product between a query vector and a passage vector, is too limited compared to models with fine-grained interactions between the query and the passage. In this paper, we challenge this belief by scaling up the size of the dual encoder model while keeping the bottleneck layer as a single dot-product with a fixed size. With multi-stage training, scaling up the model size brings significant improvement on a variety of retrieval tasks, especially for out-of-domain generalization. We further analyze the impact of the bottleneck layer and demonstrate diminishing improvement when scaling up the embedding size. Experimental results show that our dual encoders, Generalizable T5-based dense Retrievers (GTR), outperform previous sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. Most surprisingly, our ablation study finds that GTR is very data efficient, as it only needs 10% of MS Marco supervised data to match the out-of-domain performance of using all supervised data.

We provide the first exploration of sentence embeddings from text-to-text transformers (T5) including the effects of scaling up sentence encoders to 11B parameters. Sentence embeddings are broadly useful for language processing tasks. While T5 achieves impressive performance on language tasks, it is unclear how to produce sentence embeddings from encoder-decoder models. We investigate three methods to construct Sentence-T5 (ST5) models: two utilize only the T5 encoder and one using the full T5 encoder-decoder. We establish a new sentence representation transfer benchmark, SentGLUE, which extends the SentEval toolkit to nine tasks from the GLUE benchmark. Our encoder-only models outperform the previous best models on both SentEval and SentGLUE transfer tasks, including semantic textual similarity (STS). Scaling up ST5 from millions to billions of parameters shown to consistently improve performance. Finally, our encoder-decoder method achieves a new state-of-the-art on STS when using sentence embeddings.

State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. To this end, models generally utilize an encoder-only (like BERT) paradigm or an encoder-decoder (like T5) approach. These paradigms, however, are not without flaws, i.e., running the model on all query-document pairs at inference-time incurs a significant computational cost. This paper proposes a new training and inference paradigm for re-ranking. We propose to finetune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using in the form of document to query generation. Subsequently, we show that this encoder-decoder architecture can be decomposed into a decoder-only language model during inference. This results in significant inference time speedups since the decoder-only architecture only needs to learn to interpret static encoder embeddings during inference. Our experiments show that this new paradigm achieves results that are comparable to the more expensive cross-attention ranking approaches while being up to 6.8X faster. We believe this work paves the way for more efficient neural rankers that leverage large pretrained models.

A major obstacle to the wide-spread adoption of neural retrieval models is that they require large supervised training sets to surpass traditional term-based techniques, which are constructed from raw corpora. In this paper, we propose an approach to zero-shot learning for passage retrieval that uses synthetic question generation to close this gap. The question generation system is trained on general domain data, but is applied to documents in the targeted domain. This allows us to create arbitrarily large, yet noisy, question-passage relevance pairs that are domain specific. Furthermore, when this is coupled with a simple hybrid term-neural model, first-stage retrieval performance can be improved further. Empirically, we show that this is an effective strategy for building neural passage retrieval models in the absence of large training corpora. Depending on the domain, this technique can even approach the accuracy of supervised models.

In the context of neural passage retrieval, we study three promising techniques: synthetic data generation, negative sampling, and fusion. We systematically investigate how these techniques contribute to the performance of the retrieval system and how they complement each other. We propose a multi-stage framework comprising of pre-training with synthetic data, fine-tuning with labeled data, and negative sampling at both stages. We study six negative sampling strategies and apply them to the fine-tuning stage and, as a noteworthy novelty, to the synthetic data that we use for pre-training. Also, we explore fusion methods that combine negatives from different strategies. We evaluate our system using two passage retrieval tasks for open-domain QA and using MS MARCO. Our experiments show that augmenting the negative contrast in both stages is effective to improve passage retrieval accuracy and, importantly, they also show that synthetic data generation and negative sampling have additive benefits. Moreover, using the fusion of different kinds allows us to reach performance that establishes a new state-of-the-art level in two of the tasks we evaluated.

A wide variety of neural-network architectures have been proposed for the task of Chinese word segmentation. Surprisingly, we find that a bidirectional LSTM model, when combined with standard deep learning techniques and best practices, can achieve better accuracy on many of the popular datasets as compared to models based on more complex neuralnetwork architectures. Furthermore, our error analysis shows that out-of-vocabulary words remain challenging for neural-network models, and many of the remaining errors are unlikely to be fixed through architecture changes. Instead, more effort should be made on exploring resources for further improvement.

We show that small and shallow feed-forward neural networks can achieve near state-of-the-art results on a range of unstructured and structured language processing tasks while being considerably cheaper in memory and computational requirements than deep recurrent models. Motivated by resource-constrained environments like mobile phones, we showcase simple techniques for obtaining such small neural network models, and investigate different tradeoffs when deciding how to allocate a small memory budget.