@inproceedings{jiang-etal-2023-noisy,
    title = "Noisy Self-Training with Synthetic Queries for Dense Retrieval",
    author = "Jiang, Fan  and
      Drummond, Tom  and
      Cohn, Trevor",
    editor = "Bouamor, Houda  and
      Pino, Juan  and
      Bali, Kalika",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023",
    month = dec,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Singapore",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2023.findings-emnlp.803/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.803",
    pages = "11991--12008",
    abstract = "Although existing neural retrieval models reveal promising results when training data is abundant and the performance keeps improving as training data increases, collecting high-quality annotated data is prohibitively costly. To this end, we introduce a novel noisy self-training framework combined with synthetic queries, showing that neural retrievers can be improved in a self-evolution manner with no reliance on any external models. Experimental results show that our method improves consistently over existing methods on both general-domain (e.g., MS-MARCO) and out-of-domain (i.e., BEIR) retrieval benchmarks. Extra analysis on low-resource settings reveals that our method is data efficient and outperforms competitive baselines, with as little as 30{\%} of labelled training data. Further extending the framework for reranker training demonstrates that the proposed method is general and yields additional gains on tasks of diverse domains."
}