{"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/rational-retrieval-acts-leveraging-pragmatic","title":"Rational Retrieval Acts: Leveraging Pragmatic Reasoning to Improve Sparse Retrieval","arxiv_id":"2505.03676","date":"2025-05-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Arthur Satouf","Gabriel Ben Zenou","Benjamin Piwowarski","Habiboulaye Amadou Boubacar","Pablo Piantanida"],"abstract":"Current sparse neural information retrieval (IR) methods, and to a lesser extent more traditional models such as BM25, do not take into account the document collection and the complex interplay between different term weights when representing a single document. In this paper, we show how the Rational Speech Acts (RSA), a linguistics framework used to minimize the number of features to be communicated when identifying an object in a set, can be adapted to the IR case -- and in particular to the high number of potential features (here, tokens). RSA dynamically modulates token-document interactions by considering the influence of other documents in the dataset, better contrasting document representations. Experiments show that incorporating RSA consistently improves multiple sparse retrieval models and achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-domain datasets from the BEIR benchmark. https://github.com/arthur-75/Rational-Retrieval-Acts","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03676v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03676v1.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":"rational-retrieval-acts-leveraging-pragmatic","repo_url":"https://github.com/arthur-75/Rational-Retrieval-Acts","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}