Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.206 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
This work proposes the use of a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model for document ranking. Our approach is fundamentally different from a commonly adopted classificationbased formulation based on encoder-only pretrained transformer architectures such as BERT. We show how a sequence-to-sequence model can be trained to generate relevance labels as "target tokens", and how the underlying logits of these target tokens can be interpreted as relevance probabilities for ranking. Experimental results on the MS MARCO passage ranking task show that our ranking approach is superior to strong encoderonly models. On three other document retrieval test collections, we demonstrate a zeroshot transfer-based approach that outperforms previous state-of-the-art models requiring indomain cross-validation. Furthermore, we find that our approach significantly outperforms an encoder-only architecture in a data-poor setting. We investigate this observation in more detail by varying target tokens to probe the model's use of latent knowledge. Surprisingly, we find that the choice of target tokens impacts effectiveness, even for words that are closely related semantically. This finding sheds some light on why our sequence-to-sequence formulation for document ranking is effective. Code and models are available at pygaggle.ai.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Topic
- Topic Modeling
- Field
- Computer Science
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada First Research Excellence Fund
- Keywords
- Computer scienceRanking (information retrieval)Sequence (biology)EncoderRelevance (law)Artificial intelligenceTransformerTask (project management)Information retrievalMachine learningNatural language processingData miningEngineering
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes