arXiv:2604.20849cs.IRcs.AI2026-04

让检索结果保持原文结构,精准定位证据并自动补全上下文。

SPIRE: Structure-Preserving Interpretable Retrieval of Evidence

  • 用树状结构表示文档,以子文档形式保留段落、列表和表格的原始结构。
  • 在固定预算下,相比传统分段检索,证据更准确且多样性提升23%以上。
  • 适合需要高可解释性引用的问答系统,如学术写作辅助工具。

对半结构化文档(如HTML)进行检索增强生成时,现有模型因将文档线性切块而丢失结构信息,难以返回精确、可直接引用的证据片段。本文提出一种结构感知的检索管道,基于树形文档结构,以子文档形式表示候选证据:既保留原始结构特征,又可灵活扩展上下文。定义了路径、路径集、剪枝提取及两种上下文构建机制——全局上下文添加标题、列表框架等非局部信息,局部上下文则在结构邻域内紧凑扩展。在此基础上,设计基于嵌入的子文档生成器与查询时文档感知聚合步骤,实现共享结构上下文的高效复用,并引入上下文重评分模块,利用局部上下文重新评估召回结果。在多个HTML问答基准测试中,该方法在固定预算下显著提升证据质量与多样性,优于强基线,同时保持良好可扩展性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Retrieval-augmented generation over semi-structured sources such as HTML is constrained by a mismatch between document structure and the flat, sequence-based interfaces of today's embedding and generative models. Retrieval pipelines often linearize documents into fixed-size chunks before indexing, which obscures section structure, lists, and tables, and makes it difficult to return small, citation-ready evidence without losing the surrounding context that makes it interpretable. We present a structure-aware retrieval pipeline that operates over tree-structured documents. The core idea is to represent candidates as subdocuments: precise, addressable selections that preserve structural identity while deferring the choice of surrounding context. We define a small set of document primitives--paths and path sets, subdocument extraction by pruning, and two contextualization mechanisms. Global contextualization adds the non-local scaffolding needed to make a selection intelligible (e.g., titles, headers, list and table structure). Local contextualization expands a seed selection within its structural neighborhood to obtain a compact, context-rich view under a target budget. Building on these primitives, we describe an embedding-based candidate generator that indexes sentence-seeded subdocuments and a query-time, document-aware aggregation step that amortizes shared structural context. We then introduce a contextual filtering stage that re-scores retrieved candidates using locally contextualized views. Across experiments on HTML question-answering benchmarks, we find that preserving structure while contextualizing selections yields higher-quality, more diverse citations under fixed budgets than strong passage-based baselines, while maintaining scalability.

检索增强结构保持可解释性

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