Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use?
Tong Chen, Hongwei Wang, Sihao Chen, Wenhao Yu, Kaixin Ma, Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, Dong Yu
Abstract
Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our experiments reveal that indexing a corpus by fine-grained units such as propositions significantly outperforms passage-level units in retrieval tasks. Moreover, constructing prompts with fine-grained retrieved units for retrieval-augmented language models improves the performance of downstream QA tasks given a specific computation budget.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.emnlp-main.845
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Miami, Florida, USA
- Editors:
- Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15159–15177
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2024.emnlp-main.845/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.845
- Cite (ACL):
- Tong Chen, Hongwei Wang, Sihao Chen, Wenhao Yu, Kaixin Ma, Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, and Dong Yu. 2024. Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use?. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15159–15177, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (Chen et al., EMNLP 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2024.emnlp-main.845.pdf