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arXiv · 1905.01758

Investigating the Successes and Failures of BERT for Passage Re-Ranking

Harshith Padigela·Hamed Zamani·W. Bruce Croft
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Abstract

The bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model has recently advanced the state-of-the-art in passage re-ranking. In this paper, we analyze the results produced by a fine-tuned BERT model to better understand the reasons behind such substantial improvements. To this aim, we focus on the MS MARCO passage re-ranking dataset and provide potential reasons for the successes and failures of BERT for retrieval. In more detail, we empirically study a set of hypotheses and provide additional analysis to explain the successful performance of BERT.

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Harshith Padigela, Hamed Zamani, W. Bruce Croft. 2019-05-05. Investigating the Successes and Failures of BERT for Passage Re-Ranking. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01758

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