# Simple Applications of BERT for Ad Hoc Document Retrieval

Source: [Simple Applications of BERT for Ad Hoc Document Retrieval](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa65841e209131cea0aba2>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-01-04T02:59:29.716Z

Authors: Wei Yang, Haotian Zhang, Jimmy Lin

Published: 2019-03-26T15:58:33.000Z

## Abstract

Following recent successes in applying BERT to question answering, we explore simple applications to ad hoc document retrieval. This required confronting the challenge posed by documents that are typically longer than the length of input BERT was designed to handle. We address this issue by applying inference on sentences individually, and then aggregating sentence scores to produce document scores. Experiments on TREC microblog and newswire test collections show that our approach is simple yet effective, as we report the highest average precision on these datasets by neural approaches that we are aware of.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Ad hoc document retrieval on TREC Microblog 2011 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/ad-hoc-document-retrieval-on-trec-microblog-2011-test.md>): Ad hoc document retrieval; TREC Microblog 2011 (test); AP: 46.97.

- [Ad hoc document retrieval on TREC Microblog 2012 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/ad-hoc-document-retrieval-on-trec-microblog-2012-test.md>): Ad hoc document retrieval; TREC Microblog 2012 (test); AP: 30.73.

- [Ad hoc document retrieval on TREC Microblog 2013 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/ad-hoc-document-retrieval-on-trec-microblog-2013-test.md>): Ad hoc document retrieval; TREC Microblog 2013 (test); AP: 33.57.

- [Ad hoc document retrieval on TREC Microblog 2014 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/ad-hoc-document-retrieval-on-trec-microblog-2014-test.md>): Ad hoc document retrieval; TREC Microblog 2014 (test); AP: 0.5176.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.10972>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.10972.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://github.com/castorini/Anserini/blob/master/docs/%20experiments-forum2018.md>)