Generative Retrieval for Book search

TL;DR

This paper introduces GBS, a generative retrieval framework for book search that leverages data augmentation and outline-oriented encoding to improve retrieval accuracy on complex, hierarchical book data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel GBS framework with data augmentation and outline-oriented encoding to enhance generative retrieval for books.

Findings

GBS achieves 9.8% higher MRR@20 than baseline methods.

Outline-oriented encoding improves handling of long, hierarchical book information.

Data augmentation strategies enhance model training with diverse pseudo-queries.

Abstract

In book search, relevant book information should be returned in response to a query. Books contain complex, multi-faceted information such as metadata, outlines, and main text, where the outline provides hierarchical information between chapters and sections. Generative retrieval (GR) is a new retrieval paradigm that consolidates corpus information into a single model to generate identifiers of documents that are relevant to a given query. How can GR be applied to book search? Directly applying GR to book search is a challenge due to the unique characteristics of book search: The model needs to retain the complex, multi-faceted information of the book, which increases the demand for labeled data. Splitting book information and treating it as a collection of separate segments for learning might result in a loss of hierarchical information. We propose an effective Generative retrieval framework for Book Search (GBS) that features two main components: data augmentation and outline-oriented book encoding. For data augmentation, GBS constructs multiple query-book pairs for training; it constructs multiple book identifiers based on the outline, various forms of book contents, and simulates real book retrieval scenarios with varied pseudo-queries. This includes coverage-promoting book identifier augmentation, allowing the model to learn to index effectively, and diversity-enhanced query augmentation, allowing the model to learn to retrieve effectively. Outline-oriented book encoding improves length extrapolation through bi-level positional encoding and retentive attention mechanisms to maintain context over long sequences. Experiments on a proprietary Baidu dataset demonstrate that GBS outperforms strong baselines, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in terms of MRR@20, over the state-of-the-art RIPOR method...