Prompt-Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Non-Knowledge-Intensive Tasks
Zhicheng Guo Sijie Cheng Yile Wang Peng Li Yang Liu
Retrieval-augmented methods have received increasing attention to support
downstream tasks by leveraging useful information from external resources.
Recent studies mainly focus on exploring retrieval to solve knowledge-intensive
(KI) tasks. However, the potential of retrieval for most
non-knowledge-intensive (NKI) tasks remains under-explored. There are two main
challenges to leveraging retrieval-augmented methods for NKI tasks: 1) the
demand for diverse relevance score functions and 2) the dilemma between
training cost and task performance. To address these challenges, we propose a
two-stage framework for NKI tasks, named PGRA. In the first stage, we adopt a
task-agnostic retriever to build a shared static index and select candidate
evidence efficiently. In the second stage, we design a prompt-guided reranker
to rerank the nearest evidence according to task-specific relevance for the
reader. Experimental results show that PGRA outperforms other state-of-the-art
retrieval-augmented methods. Our analyses further investigate the influence
factors to model performance and demonstrate the generality of PGRA. Codes are
available at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/PGRA.