Pre-training Methods in Information Retrieval

Understand

The core of information retrieval (IR) is to identify relevant information from large-scale resources and return it as a ranked list to respond to the user's information need.

• In recent years, the resurgence of deep learning has greatly advanced this field and leads to a hot topic named NeuIR (i.e., neural information retrieval), especially the paradigm of pre-training methods (PTMs).
• Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model size, pre-trained models can learn universal language representations from massive textual data, which are beneficial to the ranking task of IR.
• Recently, a large number of works, which are dedicated to the application of PTMs in IR, have been introduced to promote the retrieval performance.