MSMARCO Models (Version 2)¶

MS MARCO is a large scale information retrieval corpus that was created based on real user search queries using Bing search engine. The provided models can be used for semantic search, i.e., given keywords / a search phrase / a question, the model will find passages that are relevant for the search query.

The training data consists of over 500k examples, while the complete corpus consist of over 8.8 Million passages.

Usage¶

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util

model = SentenceTransformer("msmarco-distilroberta-base-v2")

query_embedding = model.encode("How big is London")
passage_embedding = model.encode("London has 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census")

print("Similarity:", util.pytorch_cos_sim(query_embedding, passage_embedding))

For more details on the usage, see Applications - Information Retrieval

Performance¶

Performance is evaluated on TREC-DL 2019, which is a query-passage retrieval task where multiple queries have been annotated as with their relevance with respect to the given query. Further, we evaluate on the MS Marco Passage Retrieval dataset.

As baseline we show the results for lexical search with BM25 using Elasticsearch.

Approach NDCG@10 (TREC DL 19 Reranking) MRR@10 (MS Marco Dev)
BM25 (Elasticsearch) 45.46 17.29
msmarco-distilroberta-base-v2 65.65 28.55
msmarco-roberta-base-v2 67.18 29.17
msmarco-distilbert-base-v2 68.35 30.77

Version Histroy¶

As we work on the topic, we will publish updated (and improved) models.