The Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) task employs the retrieval-augmented framework, composed of a retriever and generator. The generators formulate the answer based on the documents retrieved by the retriever. Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators is beneficial due to their advanced QA capabilities, but they are typically too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints while some of them are only accessible via APIs. To tackle this issue and further improve ReQA performance, we propose a trainable Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (PRCA), keeping the generator as a black box. Positioned between the retriever and generator in a Pluggable manner, PRCA refines the retrieved information by operating in a token-autoregressive strategy via maximizing rewards of the reinforcement learning phase. Our experiments validate PRCA’s effectiveness in enhancing ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% improvement to fit black-box LLMs into existing frameworks, demonstrating its considerable potential in the LLMs era.

The basic tasks of ancient Chinese information processing include automatic sentence segmentation, word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition. Tasks such as lexical analysis need to be based on sentence segmentation because of the reason that a plenty of ancient books are not punctuated. However, step-by-step processing is prone to cause multi-level diffusion of errors. This paper designs and implements an integrated annotation system of sentence segmentation and lexical analysis. The BiLSTM-CRF neural network model is used to verify the generalization ability and the effect of sentence segmentation and lexical analysis on different label levels on four cross-age test sets. Research shows that the integration method adopted in ancient Chinese improves the F1-score of sentence segmentation, word segmentation and part of speech tagging. Based on the experimental results of each test set, the F1-score of sentence segmentation reached 78.95, with an average increase of 3.5%; the F1-score of word segmentation reached 85.73%, with an average increase of 0.18%; and the F1-score of part-of-speech tagging reached 72.65, with an average increase of 0.35%.