Complement Lexical Retrieval Model with Semantic Residual Embeddings

Luyu Gao, Zhuyun Dai, Tongfei Chen, Zhen Fan, Benjamin Van Durme, Jamie Callan

Abstract: This paper presents clear, a retrieval model that seeks to complement classical lexical exact-match models such as BM25 with semantic matching signals from a neural embedding matching model.clear explicitly trains the neural embedding to encode language structures and semantics that lexical retrieval fails to capture with a novel residual-based embedding learning method. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the advantages of clear over state-of-the-art retrieval models, and that it can substantially improve the end-to-end accuracy and efficiency of reranking pipelines.