# Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06467 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06467/

## Key facts

- Cited by 267 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 267)

- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10005/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07107/) (2023)
- [The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14887/) (2024)
- [MedCPT: Contrastive Pre-trained Transformers with Large-scale PubMed Search Logs for Zero-shot Biomedical Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00589/) (2023)
- [MM-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02571/) (2024)
- [Mr. TyDi: A Multi-lingual Benchmark for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08787/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Prompting for Zero-Shot Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04136/) (2023)
- [RetroMAE: Pre-Training Retrieval-oriented Language Models Via Masked Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12035/) (2022)
- [RankT5: Fine-Tuning T5 for Text Ranking with Ranking Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10634/) (2022)
- [Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09260/) (2022)
- [The Expando-Mono-Duo Design Pattern for Text Ranking with Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05667/) (2021)
- [Can Foundation Models Perform Zero-Shot Task Specification For Robot Manipulation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11134/) (2022)
- [RankVicuna: Zero-Shot Listwise Document Reranking with Open-Source Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15088/) (2023)
- [A Few Brief Notes on DeepImpact, COIL, and a Conceptual Framework for Information Retrieval Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14807/) (2021)
- [VISTA: Visualized Text Embedding For Universal Multi-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04292/) (2024)
- [FiD-Light: Efficient and Effective Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14290/) (2022)
- [Impact of Tokenization on Language Models: An Analysis for Turkish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08832/) (2022)
- [Arctic-Embed: Scalable, Efficient, and Accurate Text Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05374/) (2024)
- [A Setwise Approach for Effective and Highly Efficient Zero-shot Ranking with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09497/) (2023)
- [Fine Tuning vs. Retrieval Augmented Generation for Less Popular Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01432/) (2024)
- [Automated Medical Coding on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV: A Critical Review and Replicability Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10909/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Indexing and Retrieval for Differentiable Search Index with Query Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10128/) (2022)
- [Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage Retriever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10658/) (2022)
- [Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09984/) (2022)
- [Biomedical Question Answering: A Survey of Approaches and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05281/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing applications. This survey provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has been responsible for a paradigm shift in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and beyond. In this survey, we provide a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area. We cover a wide range of modern techniques, grouped into two high-level categories: transformer models that perform reranking in multi-stage architectures and dense retrieval techniques that perform ranking directly. There are two themes that pervade our survey: techniques for handling long documents, beyond typical sentence-by-sentence processing in NLP, and techniques for addressing the tradeoff between effectiveness (i.e., result quality) and efficiency (e.g., query latency, model and index size). Although transformer architectures and pretraining techniques are recent innovations, many aspects of how they are applied to text ranking are relatively well understood and represent mature techniques. However, there remain many open research questions, and thus in addition to laying out the foundations of pretrained transformers for text ranking, this survey also attempts to prognosticate where the field is heading.