DuReader-Retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine

AbstractIn this paper, we present DuReader-retrieval, a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval. DuReader-retrieval contains more than 90K queries and over 8M unique passages from a commercial search engine. To alleviate the shortcomings of other datasets and ensure the quality of our benchmark, we (1) reduce the false negatives in development and test sets by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers, and (2) remove the training queries that are semantically similar to the development and testing queries. Additionally, we provide two out-of-domain testing sets for cross-domain evaluation, as well as a set of human translated queries for for cross-lingual retrieval evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that DuReader-retrieval is challenging and a number of problems remain unsolved, such as the salient phrase mismatch and the syntactic mismatch between queries and paragraphs. These experiments also show that dense retrievers do not generalize well across domains, and cross-lingual retrieval is essentially challenging. DuReader-retrieval is publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader/tree/master/DuReader-Retrieval.