SPLADE — Norwegian Health & Welfare (learned-sparse retrieval)

A SPLADE learned-sparse retriever for Norwegian-language health, welfare and assistive-technology content. It turns text into a sparse vector over the vocabulary: most dimensions are zero, and the non-zero ones are weighted terms. Alongside the words that actually appear, the model expands each text with closely related terms it has learned — so everyday, lay phrasing is matched to the official terminology used in source documents, and vice-versa.

Because the output is a weighted bag of terms, it drops straight into an inverted index (e.g. Elasticsearch / OpenSearch rank_features) and works well as the sparse leg of a hybrid search stack.

Model details

Intended use

• First-stage candidate retrieval and hybrid retrieval for Norwegian health / welfare search and question answering.
• Best used to index documents and retrieve at the document level — the model's strength is bridging everyday wording to official terminology, which shows up most clearly when scoring whole documents.
• Designed to complement a dense (embedding) retriever and/or a cross-encoder reranker in a two-stage pipeline, not to replace them.

Usage

With sentence-transformers

from sentence_transformers import SparseEncoder

model = SparseEncoder("NorskHelsenett/SPLADE-v1")

query = "Hvem har rett til hjelpemidler?"
documents = [
    "Personer med varig nedsatt funksjonsevne kan søke om hjelpemidler fra NAV.",
    "Åpningstidene for legekontoret er mandag til fredag 08–15.",
]

q_emb = model.encode_query([query])
d_emb = model.encode_document(documents)

scores = model.similarity(q_emb, d_emb)
print(scores)

# Inspect which terms the query expanded to (term -> weight)
print(model.decode(q_emb[0], top_k=15))

Using the sparse vectors in a search engine

model.decode(...) gives you (term, weight) pairs. Index the document term weights as feature weights (e.g. Elasticsearch rank_features), and at query time score documents by the dot product between the query terms and the stored document terms. This is the inference-free / index-time-expansion setup SPLADE is designed for.

Training

Fine-tuned by knowledge distillation from a stronger teacher ranker on Norwegian health and welfare query–document data, with sparsity regularization so the output vectors stay compact and index-efficient. Training and evaluation used curated Norwegian questions paired with human-labelled source documents.

Evaluation

Evaluated on held-out Norwegian health/welfare questions with human-labelled ground-truth source documents. The model provides strong document-level retrieval while keeping the sparse vectors compact, and it recovers relevant documents that pure keyword matching misses by expanding lay phrasing to the formal terms used in the sources.

Limitations

• Tuned for Norwegian bokmål in the health / welfare / assistive-technology domain; it may not transfer to other languages or domains.
• 512-token limit — split long documents into passages before encoding.
• It is a sparse retriever: it is strongest as one leg of a hybrid pipeline, and its signal is cleanest at the document level rather than per short chunk.

How SPLADE works (in one paragraph)

SPLADE runs the input through a masked-language-model head and, for every token position, looks at the distribution over the whole vocabulary. Those distributions are pooled and passed through log(1 + ReLU(·)), producing a single sparse vector where each non-zero entry is a vocabulary term with a learned importance weight — combining exact-match retrieval with learned term expansion, all computable at index time.