Retrieval-augmented Generation across Heterogeneous Knowledge

Abstract

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods have been receiving increasing attention from the NLP community and achieved state-of-the-art performance on many NLP downstream tasks. Compared with conventional pre-trained generation models, RAG methods have remarkable advantages such as easy knowledge acquisition, strong scalability, and low training cost. Although existing RAG models have been applied to various knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, such as open-domain QA and dialogue systems, most of the work has focused on retrieving unstructured text documents from Wikipedia. In this paper, I first elaborate on the current obstacles to retrieving knowledge from a single-source homogeneous corpus. Then, I demonstrate evidence from both existing literature and my experiments, and provide multiple solutions on retrieval-augmented generation methods across heterogeneous knowledge.