Late Interaction

Late interaction in information retrieval focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of matching queries to documents by employing multi-vector representations and sophisticated scoring mechanisms. Current research emphasizes developing efficient algorithms like ColBERT and its variants (e.g., ColBERTv2, PLAID), which leverage late interaction to achieve state-of-the-art performance while minimizing storage and latency. These advancements are significant because they enable faster and more accurate search across massive datasets, impacting applications ranging from web search to question answering systems.