5,242 research outputs found
Deeper Text Understanding for IR with Contextual Neural Language Modeling
Neural networks provide new possibilities to automatically learn complex
language patterns and query-document relations. Neural IR models have achieved
promising results in learning query-document relevance patterns, but few
explorations have been done on understanding the text content of a query or a
document. This paper studies leveraging a recently-proposed contextual neural
language model, BERT, to provide deeper text understanding for IR. Experimental
results demonstrate that the contextual text representations from BERT are more
effective than traditional word embeddings. Compared to bag-of-words retrieval
models, the contextual language model can better leverage language structures,
bringing large improvements on queries written in natural languages. Combining
the text understanding ability with search knowledge leads to an enhanced
pre-trained BERT model that can benefit related search tasks where training
data are limited.Comment: In proceedings of SIGIR 201
Table Search Using a Deep Contextualized Language Model
Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved
impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks.
Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora,
pretrained models can capture complex syntactic word relations. In this paper,
we use the deep contextualized language model BERT for the task of ad hoc table
retrieval. We investigate how to encode table content considering the table
structure and input length limit of BERT. We also propose an approach that
incorporates features from prior literature on table retrieval and jointly
trains them with BERT. In experiments on public datasets, we show that our best
approach can outperform the previous state-of-the-art method and BERT baselines
with a large margin under different evaluation metrics.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (Long
Efficient Document Re-Ranking for Transformers by Precomputing Term Representations
Deep pretrained transformer networks are effective at various ranking tasks,
such as question answering and ad-hoc document ranking. However, their
computational expenses deem them cost-prohibitive in practice. Our proposed
approach, called PreTTR (Precomputing Transformer Term Representations),
considerably reduces the query-time latency of deep transformer networks (up to
a 42x speedup on web document ranking) making these networks more practical to
use in a real-time ranking scenario. Specifically, we precompute part of the
document term representations at indexing time (without a query), and merge
them with the query representation at query time to compute the final ranking
score. Due to the large size of the token representations, we also propose an
effective approach to reduce the storage requirement by training a compression
layer to match attention scores. Our compression technique reduces the storage
required up to 95% and it can be applied without a substantial degradation in
ranking performance.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long
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