Huifeng Guo


2022

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An Effective Post-training Embedding Binarization Approach for Fast Online Top-K Passage Matching
Yankai Chen | Yifei Zhang | Huifeng Guo | Ruiming Tang | Irwin King
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

With the rapid development of Natural Language Understanding for information retrieval, fine-tuned deep language models, e.g., BERT-based, perform remarkably effective in passage searching tasks. To lower the architecture complexity, the recent state-of-the-art model ColBERT employs Contextualized Late Interaction paradigm to independently learn fine-grained query-passage representations. Apart from the architecture simplification, embedding binarization, as another promising branch in model compression, further specializes in the reduction of memory and computation overheads. In this concise paper, we propose an effective post-training embedding binarization approach over ColBERT, achieving both architecture-level and embedding-level optimization for online inference. The empirical results demonstrate the efficaciousness of our proposed approach, empowering it to perform online query-passage matching acceleration.