Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

Vladimir Karpukhin, Barlas Oguz, Sewon Min, Patrick Lewis, Ledell Wu, Sergey Edunov, Danqi Chen, Wen-tau Yih


Abstract
Open-domain question answering relies on efficient passage retrieval to select candidate contexts, where traditional sparse vector space models, such as TF-IDF or BM25, are the de facto method. In this work, we show that retrieval can be practically implemented using dense representations alone, where embeddings are learned from a small number of questions and passages by a simple dual-encoder framework. When evaluated on a wide range of open-domain QA datasets, our dense retriever outperforms a strong Lucene-BM25 system greatly by 9%-19% absolute in terms of top-20 passage retrieval accuracy, and helps our end-to-end QA system establish new state-of-the-art on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.550
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6769–6781
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.550
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.550
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vladimir Karpukhin, Barlas Oguz, Sewon Min, Patrick Lewis, Ledell Wu, Sergey Edunov, Danqi Chen, and Wen-tau Yih. 2020. Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6769–6781, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (Karpukhin et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.550.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939151
Code
 facebookresearch/DPR +  additional community code
Data
Natural QuestionsSQuADTriviaQAWebQuestions