Shanxiu He


2024

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Threshold-driven Pruning with Segmented Maximum Term Weights for Approximate Cluster-based Sparse Retrieval
Yifan Qiao | Parker Carlson | Shanxiu He | Yingrui Yang | Tao Yang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper revisits dynamic pruning through rank score thresholding in cluster-based sparse retrieval to skip the index partially at cluster and document levels during inference. It proposes a two-parameter pruning control scheme called ASC with a probabilistic guarantee on rank-safeness competitiveness. ASC uses cluster-level maximum weight segmentation to improve accuracy of rank score bound estimation and threshold-driven pruning, and is targeted for speeding up retrieval applications requiring high relevance competitiveness. The experiments with MS MARCO and BEIR show that ASC improves the accuracy and safeness of pruning for better relevance while delivering a low latency on a single-threaded CPU.