Contextualized sparse representations for real-time open-domain question answering

Jinhyuk Lee, Minjoon Seo, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Jaewoo Kang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Open-domain question answering can be formulated as a phrase retrieval problem, in which we can expect huge scalability and speed benefit but often suffer from low accuracy due to the limitation of existing phrase representation models. In this paper, we aim to improve the quality of each phrase embedding by augmenting it with a contextualized sparse representation (SPARC). Unlike previous sparse vectors that are term-frequency-based (e.g., tf-idf) or directly learned (only few thousand dimensions), we leverage rectified self-attention to indirectly learn sparse vectors in n-gram vocabulary space. By augmenting the previous phrase retrieval model (Seo et al., 2019) with SPARC, we show 4%+ improvement in CuratedTREC and SQuAD-Open. Our CuratedTREC score is even better than the best known retrieve & read model with at least 45x faster inference speed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL 2020 - 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages912-919
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148255
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 2020 Jul 52020 Jul 10

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period20/7/520/7/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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