# Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01666 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01666/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06967/) (2021)
- [Document Expansion by Query Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08375/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Corpus Aware Language Model Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05540/) (2021)
- [CLIMATE-FEVER: A Dataset for Verification of Real-World Climate Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00614/) (2020)
- [RetroMAE: Pre-Training Retrieval-oriented Language Models Via Masked Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12035/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Spoiler Detection from Large-Scale Review Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13416/) (2019)
- [SPARTA: Efficient Open-Domain Question Answering via Sparse Transformer Matching Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13013/) (2020)
- [ERNIE-Search: Bridging Cross-Encoder with Dual-Encoder via Self On-the-fly Distillation for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09153/) (2022)
- [Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10156/) (2023)
- [RELIC: Retrieving Evidence for Literary Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10053/) (2022)
- [Narrative Question Answering with Cutting-Edge Open-Domain QA Techniques: A Comprehensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03826/) (2021)
- [BERM: Training the Balanced and Extractable Representation for Matching to Improve Generalization Ability of Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11052/) (2023)
- [Match-Prompt: Improving Multi-task Generalization Ability for Neural Text Matching via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02725/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00299/) (2022)

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

- [Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13551/) (2024)
- [SitEmb-v1.5: Improved Context-Aware Dense Retrieval for Semantic Association and Long Story Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01959/) (2025)
- [Previously on the Stories: Recap Snippet Identification for Story Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07271/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieving relevant plots from the book for a query is a critical task, which can improve the reading experience and efficiency of readers. Readers usually only give an abstract and vague description as the query based on their own understanding, summaries, or speculations of the plot, which requires the retrieval model to have a strong ability to estimate the abstract semantic associations between the query and candidate plots. However, existing information retrieval (IR) datasets cannot reflect this ability well. In this paper, we propose Plot Retrieval, a labeled dataset to train and evaluate the performance of IR models on the novel task Plot Retrieval. Text pairs in Plot Retrieval have less word overlap and more abstract semantic association, which can reflect the ability of the IR models to estimate the abstract semantic association, rather than just traditional lexical or semantic matching. Extensive experiments across various lexical retrieval, sparse retrieval, dense retrieval, and cross-encoder methods compared with human studies on Plot Retrieval show current IR models still struggle in capturing abstract semantic association between texts. Plot Retrieval can be the benchmark for further research on the semantic association modeling ability of IR models.