GripRank: Bridging the Gap between Retrieval and Generation via the Generative Knowledge Improved Passage Ranking

Retrieval-enhanced text generation, which aims to leverage passages retrieved from a large passage corpus for delivering a proper answer given the input query, has shown remarkable progress on knowledge-intensive language tasks such as open-domain question answering and knowledge-enhanced dialogue generation. However, the retrieved passages are not ideal for guiding answer generation because of the discrepancy between retrieval and generation, i.e., the candidate passages are all treated equally during the retrieval procedure without considering their potential to generate the proper answers. This discrepancy makes a passage retriever deliver a sub-optimal collection of candidate passages to generate answers. In this paper, we propose the GeneRative Knowledge Improved Passage Ranking (GripRank) approach, addressing the above challenge by distilling knowledge from a generative passage estimator (GPE) to a passage ranker, where the GPE is a generative language model used to measure how likely the candidate passages can generate the proper answer. We realize the distillation procedure by teaching the passage ranker learning to rank the passages ordered by the GPE. Furthermore, we improve the distillation quality by devising a curriculum knowledge distillation mechanism, which allows the knowledge provided by the GPE can be progressively distilled to the ranker through an easy-to-hard curriculum, enabling the passage ranker to correctly recognize the provenance of the answer from many plausible candidates. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets across three knowledge-intensive language tasks. Experimental results show advantages over the state-of-the-art methods for both passage ranking and answer generation on the KILT benchmark.