Why Advanced Encoders Lag on Sparse Retrieval? The Answer and an Approach to Bridging Vocabulary Gaps
Zhichao Geng · Yang Yang
摘要
While advanced foundation models like ModernBERT significantly outperform older architectures in dense retrieval, they surprisingly lag behind the aging BERT-base baseline in learned sparse retrieval (LSR). We identify the root cause as the Vocabulary Gap : modern tokenizers utilize raw, case-sen...