Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering
Yuning Mao, Pengcheng He, Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han, Weizhu Chen
Abstract
We propose Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) for answering open-domain questions, which augments a query through text generation of heuristically discovered relevant contexts without external resources as supervision. We demonstrate that the generated contexts substantially enrich the semantics of the queries and GAR with sparse representations (BM25) achieves comparable or better performance than state-of-the-art dense retrieval methods such as DPR. We show that generating diverse contexts for a query is beneficial as fusing their results consistently yields better retrieval accuracy. Moreover, as sparse and dense representations are often complementary, GAR can be easily combined with DPR to achieve even better performance. GAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets under the extractive QA setup when equipped with an extractive reader, and consistently outperforms other retrieval methods when the same generative reader is used.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.316
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4089–4100
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.316
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.316
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuning Mao, Pengcheng He, Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han, and Weizhu Chen. 2021. Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4089–4100, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (Mao et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.acl-long.316.pdf
- Code
- morningmoni/GAR
- Data
- Natural Questions, TriviaQA