# Multistage BiCross encoder for multilingual access to COVID-19 health information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03013 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03013/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [Simple Applications of BERT for Ad Hoc Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10972/) (2019)
- [Covidex: Neural Ranking Models and Keyword Search Infrastructure for the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07846/) (2020)
- [Let's measure run time! Extending the IR replicability infrastructure to include performance aspects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04614/) (2019)
- [Cross-Lingual Relevance Transfer for Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02989/) (2019)
- [SLEDGE-Z: A Zero-Shot Baseline for COVID-19 Literature Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05987/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Sentence-Level Relevance Feedback for High-Recall Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08988/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Categorising Fine-to-Coarse Grained Misinformation: An Empirical Study of COVID-19 Infodemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11702/) (2021)
- [Breaking Language Barriers with MMTweets: Advancing Cross-Lingual Debunked Narrative Retrieval for Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05680/) (2023)
- [GateNLP-UShef at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Entity-Enriched Siamese Transformer for Multilingual News Article Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15812/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a rapidly growing 'infodemic' of health information online. This has motivated the need for accurate semantic search and retrieval of reliable COVID-19 information across millions of documents, in multiple languages. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel high precision and high recall neural Multistage BiCross encoder approach. It is a sequential three-stage ranking pipeline which uses the Okapi BM25 retrieval algorithm and transformer-based bi-encoder and cross-encoder to effectively rank the documents with respect to the given query. We present experimental results from our participation in the Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) shared task on COVID-19 multilingual semantic search. The independently evaluated MLIA results validate our approach and demonstrate that it outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches according to nearly all evaluation metrics in cases of both monolingual and bilingual runs.