Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhuang, Honglei, Qin, Zhen, Hui, Kai, Wu, Junru, Yan, Le, Wang, Xuanhui, Bendersky, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Zhuang, Honglei
Qin, Zhen
Hui, Kai
Wu, Junru
Yan, Le
Wang, Xuanhui
Bendersky, Michael
author_facet Zhuang, Honglei
Qin, Zhen
Hui, Kai
Wu, Junru
Yan, Le
Wang, Xuanhui
Bendersky, Michael
contents Zero-shot text rankers powered by recent LLMs achieve remarkable ranking performance by simply prompting. Existing prompts for pointwise LLM rankers mostly ask the model to choose from binary relevance labels like "Yes" and "No". However, the lack of intermediate relevance label options may cause the LLM to provide noisy or biased answers for documents that are partially relevant to the query. We propose to incorporate fine-grained relevance labels into the prompt for LLM rankers, enabling them to better differentiate among documents with different levels of relevance to the query and thus derive a more accurate ranking. We study two variants of the prompt template, coupled with different numbers of relevance levels. Our experiments on 8 BEIR data sets show that adding fine-grained relevance labels significantly improves the performance of LLM rankers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_14122
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels
Zhuang, Honglei
Qin, Zhen
Hui, Kai
Wu, Junru
Yan, Le
Wang, Xuanhui
Bendersky, Michael
Information Retrieval
Zero-shot text rankers powered by recent LLMs achieve remarkable ranking performance by simply prompting. Existing prompts for pointwise LLM rankers mostly ask the model to choose from binary relevance labels like "Yes" and "No". However, the lack of intermediate relevance label options may cause the LLM to provide noisy or biased answers for documents that are partially relevant to the query. We propose to incorporate fine-grained relevance labels into the prompt for LLM rankers, enabling them to better differentiate among documents with different levels of relevance to the query and thus derive a more accurate ranking. We study two variants of the prompt template, coupled with different numbers of relevance levels. Our experiments on 8 BEIR data sets show that adding fine-grained relevance labels significantly improves the performance of LLM rankers.
title Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14122