Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond

Text ranking takes a central place in Information Retrieval (IR), with Web search as its best-known application. More generally, text ranking models are applicable to any Natural Language Processing (NLP) task in which relevance of information plays a role, from filtering and recommendation applications to question answering and semantic similarity comparisons. Since the rise of BERT in 2019, Transformer models have become the most used and studied architectures in both NLP and IR, and they have been applied to basically any task in our research fields—including text ranking. In a fast-changing research context, it can be challenging to keep lecture materials up to date. Lecturers in NLP are grateful for Dan Jurafsky and James Martin for yearly updating the 3rd edition of their textbook, making Speech and Language Processing the most comprehensive, modern textbook for NLP. The IR field is less fortunate, still relying on older textbooks, extended with a collection of recent materials that address neural models. The textbook Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond by Jimmy Lin, Rodrigo Nogueira, and Andrew Yates is a great effort to collect the recent developments in the use of Transformers for text ranking. The introduction of the book is well-scoped with clear guidance for the reader about topics that are out of scope (such as user aspects). This is followed by an excellent history section, stating for example: