Leveraging Multi-view Inter-passage Interactions for Neural Document Ranking

The configuration of 512 window size prevents transformers from being directly applicable to document ranking that requires larger context. Hence, recent works propose to estimate document relevance with fine-grained passage-level relevance signals. A limitation of such models, however, is that scoring each passage independently falls short in modeling inter-passage interactions and leads to unsatisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a Multiview inter-passage Interaction based Ranking model (MIR), to combine intra-passage interactions and inter-passage interactions in a complementary manner. The former captures local semantic relations inside each passage, whereas the latter draws global dependencies between different passages. Moreover, we represent inter-passage relationships via multi-view attention patterns, allowing information propagation at token, sentence, and passage-level. The representations at different levels of granularity, being aware of global context, are then aggregated into a document-level representation for ranking. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that modeling inter-passage interactions brings substantial improvements over existing passage-level methods.