Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Tianhua, Li, Kun, Luo, Hongyin, Wu, Xixin, Glass, James, Meng, Helen
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Zhang, Tianhua
Li, Kun
Luo, Hongyin
Wu, Xixin
Glass, James
Meng, Helen
author_facet Zhang, Tianhua
Li, Kun
Luo, Hongyin
Wu, Xixin
Glass, James
Meng, Helen
contents Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever's preference during the training of rewriting models. However, these approaches typically rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting the models' generalization and adaptation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AdaQR ($\textbf{Ada}$ptive $\textbf{Q}$uery $\textbf{R}$ewriting), a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. Our approach begins by fine-tuning compact large language models using only ~$10\%$ of rewrite annotations from the seed dataset training split. The models are then utilized to generate rewrite candidates for each query instance. A novel approach is then proposed to assess retriever's preference for these candidates by the probability of answers conditioned on the conversational query by marginalizing the Top-$K$ passages. This serves as the reward for optimizing the rewriter further using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a process free of rewrite and retrieval annotations. Experimental results on four open-domain CQA datasets demonstrate that AdaQR not only enhances the in-domain capabilities of the rewriter with limited annotation requirement, but also adapts effectively to out-of-domain datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_10991
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers
Zhang, Tianhua
Li, Kun
Luo, Hongyin
Wu, Xixin
Glass, James
Meng, Helen
Computation and Language
Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever's preference during the training of rewriting models. However, these approaches typically rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting the models' generalization and adaptation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AdaQR ($\textbf{Ada}$ptive $\textbf{Q}$uery $\textbf{R}$ewriting), a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. Our approach begins by fine-tuning compact large language models using only ~$10\%$ of rewrite annotations from the seed dataset training split. The models are then utilized to generate rewrite candidates for each query instance. A novel approach is then proposed to assess retriever's preference for these candidates by the probability of answers conditioned on the conversational query by marginalizing the Top-$K$ passages. This serves as the reward for optimizing the rewriter further using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a process free of rewrite and retrieval annotations. Experimental results on four open-domain CQA datasets demonstrate that AdaQR not only enhances the in-domain capabilities of the rewriter with limited annotation requirement, but also adapts effectively to out-of-domain datasets.
title Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10991