Optimizing Component Combination in a Multi-Indexing Paragraph Retrieval System

TL;DR

This paper presents a heuristic optimization method to effectively combine multiple components in a multi-indexing paragraph retrieval system, improving result quality and identifying the most valuable components.

Contribution

It introduces a heuristic weight optimization approach for component combination in paragraph retrieval systems, enhancing performance and component evaluation.

Findings

Optimized component weights improve retrieval quality.

The method identifies the most valuable system components.

Results demonstrate significant performance gains.

Abstract

We demonstrate a method to optimize the combination of distinct components in a paragraph retrieval system. Our system makes use of several indices, query generators and filters, each of them potentially contributing to the quality of the returned list of results. The components are combined with a weighed sum, and we optimize the weights using a heuristic optimization algorithm. This allows us to maximize the quality of our results, but also to determine which components are most valuable in our system. We evaluate our approach on the paragraph selection task of a Question Answering dataset.