Abstract
Recently, methods have been developed to improve the performance of dense passage retrieval by using context-supervised pre-training. These methods simply consider two passages from the same document to be relevant, without taking into account the potential negative impacts of weakly correlated pairs. Thus, this paper proposes query-as-context pre-training, a simple yet effective pre-training technique to alleviate the issue. Query-as-context pre-training assumes that the query derived from a passage is more likely to be relevant to that passage and forms a passage-query pair. These passage-query pairs are then used in contrastive or generative context-supervised pre-training. The pre-trained models are evaluated on large-scale passage retrieval benchmarks and out-of-domain zero-shot benchmarks. Experimental results show that query-as-context pre-training brings considerable gains for retrieval performances, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.118
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1906–1916
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.118
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.118
- Cite (ACL):
- Xing W, Guangyuan Ma, Wanhui Qian, Zijia Lin, and Songlin Hu. 2023. Query-as-context Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1906–1916, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Query-as-context Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval (W et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.emnlp-main.118.pdf