{"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/retrieval-for-extremely-long-queries-and","title":"Retrieval for Extremely Long Queries and Documents with RPRS: a Highly Efficient and Effective Transformer-based Re-Ranker","arxiv_id":"2303.01200","date":"2023-03-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Arian Askari","Suzan Verberne","Amin Abolghasemi","Wessel Kraaij","Gabriella Pasi"],"abstract":"Retrieval with extremely long queries and documents is a well-known and challenging task in information retrieval and is commonly known as Query-by-Document (QBD) retrieval. Specifically designed Transformer models that can handle long input sequences have not shown high effectiveness in QBD tasks in previous work. We propose a Re-Ranker based on the novel Proportional Relevance Score (RPRS) to compute the relevance score between a query and the top-k candidate documents. Our extensive evaluation shows RPRS obtains significantly better results than the state-of-the-art models on five different datasets. Furthermore, RPRS is highly efficient since all documents can be pre-processed, embedded, and indexed before query time which gives our re-ranker the advantage of having a complexity of O(N) where N is the total number of sentences in the query and candidate documents. Furthermore, our method solves the problem of the low-resource training in QBD retrieval tasks as it does not need large amounts of training data, and has only three parameters with a limited range that can be optimized with a grid search even if a small amount of labeled data is available. Our detailed analysis shows that RPRS benefits from covering the full length of candidate documents and queries.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01200v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01200v2.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":"retrieval-for-extremely-long-queries-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/arian-askari/rprs","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.01200","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}