Searchplex ID Retrieval terminology registry

Method

Dual Encoder

Canonical ID https://id.searchplex.net/dual-encoder/

A neural architecture that encodes the two sides of a matching problem independently, such as a query and a document, and compares their resulting representations using a similarity or scoring function.

Also called

Scope

In information retrieval, a dual encoder commonly uses separate query and document encoding paths so document representations can be computed ahead of time and efficiently searched. The two encoders may use separate parameters or share some or all parameters. Bi-encoder is commonly used as an equivalent term.

Observed terms

Used for

Related

Not equivalent to

  • Dual Encoder is not Cross-Encoder. Dual encoders encode each side independently; cross-encoders process the pair jointly.
  • Dual Encoder is not Dense Encoder. A dense encoder maps one input to a dense vector; a dual encoder applies encoders to two sides of a matching problem and compares the representations.
  • Dual Encoder is not Dense Retrieval. A dual encoder is an architecture or method; dense retrieval is retrieval using dense representations and is commonly implemented with dual encoders.

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