2020

SparTerm: Learning Term-based Sparse Representation for Fast Text Retrieval

Bai, Yang, Li, Xiaoguang, Wang, Gang et al.

Understand

Term-based sparse representations dominate the first-stage text retrieval in industrial applications, due to its advantage in efficiency, interpretability, and exact term matching.

  • In this paper, we study the problem of transferring the deep knowledge of the pre-trained language model (PLM) to Term-based Sparse representations, aiming to improve the representation capacity of bag-of-words(BoW) method for semantic-level matching, while still keeping its advantages.
  • Specifically, we propose a novel framework SparTerm to directly learn sparse text representations in the full vocabulary space.
  • The proposed SparTerm comprises an importance predictor to predict the importance for each term in the vocabulary, and a gating controller to control the term activation.

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