No More Free Lunch: Corpus Task Complexity Matters as Corpora Grow
Given a large corpus, the questions one might ask can vary -- from "When was the first human heart transplant?" to "What are all the contradictory claims in this literature?" -- but what makes some questions more challenging than others? In this work, we define a notion of Corpus Task Complexity (CTC) that characterizes tasks by how their difficulty grows with corpus size; for instance, a retrieval query only requires a single linear pass over a corpus, while finding contradictions requires checking a quadratically growing set of claim pairs. Observing that prior work has largely only studied tasks whose difficulty grows linearly with corpus size, which we call low CTC tasks, we introduce...
| Authors | Prasann Singhal, Amanda Bertsch, Jacob Steinhardt et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 September 2026 |
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