mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A White Box Analysis of ColBERT

arXiv 2012.09650 ↗First posted 17 Dec 2020cs.IRcited by 14

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based models are nowadays state-of-the-art in ad-hoc Information Retrieval, but their behavior is far from being understood. Recent work has claimed that BERT does not satisfy the classical IR axioms. However, we propose to dissect the matching process of ColBERT, through the analysis of term importance and exact/soft matching patterns. Even if the traditional axioms are not formally verified, our analysis reveals that ColBERT: (i) is able to capture a notion of term importance; (ii) relies on exact matches for important terms.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2020.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 3; 2023: 0; 2024: 2; 2025: 5; 2026: 2.

14 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2025Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 29
  2. 2025Video-ColBERT: Contextualized Late Interaction for Text-to-Video Retrievalcited by 20
  3. 2021Mitigating the Position Bias of Transformer Models in Passage Re-Rankingcited by 10
  4. 2021Match Your Words! A Study of Lexical Matching in Neural Information Retrievalcited by 10
  5. 2025Efficient Constant-Space Multi-Vector Retrievalcited by 10
  6. 2024Generative Retrieval as Multi-Vector Dense Retrievalcited by 8
  7. 2025Pathway to Relevance: How Cross-Encoders Implement a Semantic Variant of BM25cited by 6
  8. 2024Probing Ranking LLMs: A Mechanistic Analysis for Information Retrievalcited by 2
  9. 2025Simple Projection Variants Improve ColBERT Performancecited by 2
  10. 2022The Role of Complex NLP in Transformers for Text Ranking?cited by 1
  11. 2022How Different are Pre-trained Transformers for Text Ranking?cited by 0
  12. 2022Explainability of Text Processing and Retrieval Methods: A Surveycited by 0
2 more
  1. 2026GEM: A Native Graph-based Index for Multi-Vector Retrievalcited by 0
  2. 2026ColBERTSaR: Sparsified ColBERT Index via Product Quantizationcited by 0