A Proposed Conceptual Framework for a Representational Approach to Information Retrieval

Understand

This paper outlines a conceptual framework for understanding recent developments in information retrieval and natural language processing that attempts to integrate dense and sparse retrieval methods.

• I propose a representational approach that breaks the core text retrieval problem into a logical scoring model and a physical retrieval model.
• The scoring model is defined in terms of encoders, which map queries and documents into a representational space, and a comparison function that computes query-document scores.
• The physical retrieval model defines how a system produces the top-$k$ scoring documents from an arbitrarily large corpus with respect to a query.