Overview of the TREC 2020 deep learning track
This provides incremental evidence for the effectiveness of BERT-style models in information retrieval tasks with large datasets.
The paper reports on the TREC 2020 Deep Learning Track, which studied ad hoc ranking methods in a large training data regime, finding that rankers with BERT-style pretraining outperformed other methods.
This is the second year of the TREC Deep Learning Track, with the goal of studying ad hoc ranking in the large training data regime. We again have a document retrieval task and a passage retrieval task, each with hundreds of thousands of human-labeled training queries. We evaluate using single-shot TREC-style evaluation, to give us a picture of which ranking methods work best when large data is available, with much more comprehensive relevance labeling on the small number of test queries. This year we have further evidence that rankers with BERT-style pretraining outperform other rankers in the large data regime.