Paper ID: 2408.16672

Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retriever

Rohan Jha, Bo Wang, Michael Günther, Georgios Mastrapas, Saba Sturua, Isabelle Mohr, Andreas Koukounas, Mohammad Kalim Akram, Nan Wang, Han Xiao

Multi-vector dense models, such as ColBERT, have proven highly effective in information retrieval. ColBERT's late interaction scoring approximates the joint query-document attention seen in cross-encoders while maintaining inference efficiency closer to traditional dense retrieval models, thanks to its bi-encoder architecture and recent optimizations in indexing and search. In this work we propose a number of incremental improvements to the ColBERT model architecture and training pipeline, using methods shown to work in the more mature single-vector embedding model training paradigm, particularly those that apply to heterogeneous multilingual data or boost efficiency with little tradeoff. Our new model, Jina-ColBERT-v2, demonstrates strong performance across a range of English and multilingual retrieval tasks.

Submitted: Aug 29, 2024