about
A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval (arxiv.org)
2 points by georgehill on Dec 12, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of building a fixed index and searching it, this system trains a network to read a question and directly write out the IDs of the right documents. It found the top document correctly 21.4% more often than the best traditional search on a benchmark.

Abstract

Current state-of-the-art document retrieval solutions mainly follow an index-retrieve paradigm, where the index is hard to be directly optimized for the final retrieval target. In this paper, we aim to show that an end-to-end deep neural network unifying training and indexing stages can significantly improve the recall performance of traditional methods. To this end, we propose Neural Corpus Indexer (NCI), a sequence-to-sequence network that generates relevant document identifiers directly for a designated query. To optimize the recall performance of NCI, we invent a prefix-aware weight-adaptive decoder architecture, and leverage tailored techniques including query generation, semantic document identifiers, and consistency-based regularization. Empirical studies demonstrated the superiority of NCI on two commonly used academic benchmarks, achieving +21.4% and +16.8% relative enhancement for Recall@1 on NQ320k dataset and R-Precision on TriviaQA dataset, respectively, compared to the best baseline method.

Yujing Wang, Yingyan Hou, Haonan Wang, Ziming Miao, Shibin Wu, Hao Sun, Qi Chen, Yuqing Xia, Chengmin Chi, Guoshuai Zhao, Zheng Liu, Xing Xie, et al.
arXiv:2206.02743 · cs.IR · submitted Jun 6, 2022 · updated Feb 12, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · 19 pages, 6 figures, accepted by NeurIPS 2022

add comment on HN