Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

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 largely 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.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Question Answering NaturalQA DPR EM 41.5 # 1
Question Answering Natural Questions DPR EM 41.5 # 15
Passage Retrieval Natural Questions DPR Precision@20 79.4 # 7
Precision@100 86 # 8
Question Answering TriviaQA DPR EM 56.8 # 31
Question Answering WebQuestions DPR EM 42.4 # 7

Methods


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