{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/exploring-classic-and-neural-lexical","title":"Exploring Classic and Neural Lexical Translation Models for Information Retrieval: Interpretability, Effectiveness, and Efficiency Benefits","arxiv_id":"2102.06815","date":"2021-02-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Leonid Boytsov","Zico Kolter"],"abstract":"We study the utility of the lexical translation model (IBM Model 1) for English text retrieval, in particular, its neural variants that are trained end-to-end. We use the neural Model1 as an aggregator layer applied to context-free or contextualized query/document embeddings. This new approach to design a neural ranking system has benefits for effectiveness, efficiency, and interpretability. Specifically, we show that adding an interpretable neural Model 1 layer on top of BERT-based contextualized embeddings (1) does not decrease accuracy and/or efficiency; and (2) may overcome the limitation on the maximum sequence length of existing BERT models. The context-free neural Model 1 is less effective than a BERT-based ranking model, but it can run efficiently on a CPU (without expensive index-time precomputation or query-time operations on large tensors). Using Model 1 we produced best neural and non-neural runs on the MS MARCO document ranking leaderboard in late 2020.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06815v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06815v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"exploring-classic-and-neural-lexical","repo_url":"https://github.com/oaqa/FlexNeuART","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"exploring-classic-and-neural-lexical","repo_url":"https://github.com/oaqa/knn4qa","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"CPU"},{"task_slug":"document-ranking","task_name":"Document Ranking"},{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"text-retrieval","task_name":"Text Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2102.06815","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}