Heterogeneous graph attention networks for passage retrieval
Résumé
This paper presents an exploration of the usage of Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks,
or HGATs, for the task of Passage Retrieval. More precisely, we study how these
models perform to alleviate the problem of passage contextualization, that is incorporating
information about the context of a passage (its containing document, neighbouring passages,
etc.) in its relevance estimation. We first propose several configurations to compute
contextualized passage representations, including a document graph representation composed
of contextualizing signals and judiciously modified HGAT architectures. We then
present how we integrate these configurations in a neural passage ranking model. We
evaluate our approach on a Passage Retrieval task on patent documents: CLEF-IP2013,
as these documents possess several different contextualizing signals fully exploited in our
models. Our results show that some HGAT architecture modifications allow for a better
context representation leading to improved performances and stability.