DUQGen: Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Rankers by Diversifying Synthetic Query Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chandradevan, Ramraj, Dhole, Kaustubh D., Agichtein, Eugene
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866917629445275648
author Chandradevan, Ramraj
Dhole, Kaustubh D.
Agichtein, Eugene
author_facet Chandradevan, Ramraj
Dhole, Kaustubh D.
Agichtein, Eugene
contents State-of-the-art neural rankers pre-trained on large task-specific training data such as MS-MARCO, have been shown to exhibit strong performance on various ranking tasks without domain adaptation, also called zero-shot. However, zero-shot neural ranking may be sub-optimal, as it does not take advantage of the target domain information. Unfortunately, acquiring sufficiently large and high quality target training data to improve a modern neural ranker can be costly and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to unsupervised domain adaptation for ranking, DUQGen, which addresses a critical gap in prior literature, namely how to automatically generate both effective and diverse synthetic training data to fine tune a modern neural ranker for a new domain. Specifically, DUQGen produces a more effective representation of the target domain by identifying clusters of similar documents; and generates a more diverse training dataset by probabilistic sampling over the resulting document clusters. Our extensive experiments, over the standard BEIR collection, demonstrate that DUQGen consistently outperforms all zero-shot baselines and substantially outperforms the SOTA baselines on 16 out of 18 datasets, for an average of 4% relative improvement across all datasets. We complement our results with a thorough analysis for more in-depth understanding of the proposed method's performance and to identify promising areas for further improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_02489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DUQGen: Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Rankers by Diversifying Synthetic Query Generation
Chandradevan, Ramraj
Dhole, Kaustubh D.
Agichtein, Eugene
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
State-of-the-art neural rankers pre-trained on large task-specific training data such as MS-MARCO, have been shown to exhibit strong performance on various ranking tasks without domain adaptation, also called zero-shot. However, zero-shot neural ranking may be sub-optimal, as it does not take advantage of the target domain information. Unfortunately, acquiring sufficiently large and high quality target training data to improve a modern neural ranker can be costly and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to unsupervised domain adaptation for ranking, DUQGen, which addresses a critical gap in prior literature, namely how to automatically generate both effective and diverse synthetic training data to fine tune a modern neural ranker for a new domain. Specifically, DUQGen produces a more effective representation of the target domain by identifying clusters of similar documents; and generates a more diverse training dataset by probabilistic sampling over the resulting document clusters. Our extensive experiments, over the standard BEIR collection, demonstrate that DUQGen consistently outperforms all zero-shot baselines and substantially outperforms the SOTA baselines on 16 out of 18 datasets, for an average of 4% relative improvement across all datasets. We complement our results with a thorough analysis for more in-depth understanding of the proposed method's performance and to identify promising areas for further improvements.
title DUQGen: Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Rankers by Diversifying Synthetic Query Generation
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02489