Abstract
Contextual models like BERT are highly effective in numerous text-ranking tasks. However, it is still unclear as to whether contextual models understand well-established notions of relevance that are central to IR. In this paper, we use probing, a recent approach used to analyze language models, to investigate the ranking abilities of BERT-based rankers. Most of the probing literature has focussed on linguistic and knowledge-aware capabilities of models or axiomatic analysis of ranking models. In this paper, we fill an important gap in the information retrieval literature by conducting a layer-wise probing analysis using four probes based on lexical matching, semantic similarity as well as linguistic properties like coreference resolution and named entity recognition. Our experiments show an interesting trend that BERT-rankers better encode ranking abilities at intermediate layers. Based on our observations, we train a ranking model by augmenting the ranking data with the probe data to show initial yet consistent performance improvements (The code is available at https://github.com/yolomeus/probing-search/ ).
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Advances in Information Retrieval - 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023, Proceedings |
Editors | Jaap Kamps, Lorraine Goeuriot, Fabio Crestani, Maria Maistro, Hideo Joho, Brian Davis, Cathal Gurrin, Annalina Caputo, Udo Kruschwitz |
Place of Publication | Cham |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 255-273 |
Number of pages | 19 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-031-28238-6 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-3-031-28237-9 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Event | 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023 - Dublin, Ireland Duration: 2 Apr 2023 → 6 Apr 2023 |
Publication series
Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
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Publisher | Springer |
Volume | 13981 |
ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
Conference | 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023 |
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Country/Territory | Ireland |
City | Dublin |
Period | 2/04/23 → 6/04/23 |
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-careOtherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.