Re-Ranking Step by Step: Investigating Pre-Filtering for Re-Ranking with Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Nouriinanloo, Baharan, Lamothe, Maxime
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Nouriinanloo, Baharan
Lamothe, Maxime
author_facet Nouriinanloo, Baharan
Lamothe, Maxime
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have been revolutionizing a myriad of natural language processing tasks with their diverse zero-shot capabilities. Indeed, existing work has shown that LLMs can be used to great effect for many tasks, such as information retrieval (IR), and passage ranking. However, current state-of-the-art results heavily lean on the capabilities of the LLM being used. Currently, proprietary, and very large LLMs such as GPT-4 are the highest performing passage re-rankers. Hence, users without the resources to leverage top of the line LLMs, or ones that are closed source, are at a disadvantage. In this paper, we investigate the use of a pre-filtering step before passage re-ranking in IR. Our experiments show that by using a small number of human generated relevance scores, coupled with LLM relevance scoring, it is effectively possible to filter out irrelevant passages before re-ranking. Our experiments also show that this pre-filtering then allows the LLM to perform significantly better at the re-ranking task. Indeed, our results show that smaller models such as Mixtral can become competitive with much larger proprietary models (e.g., ChatGPT and GPT-4).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18740
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Re-Ranking Step by Step: Investigating Pre-Filtering for Re-Ranking with Large Language Models
Nouriinanloo, Baharan
Lamothe, Maxime
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been revolutionizing a myriad of natural language processing tasks with their diverse zero-shot capabilities. Indeed, existing work has shown that LLMs can be used to great effect for many tasks, such as information retrieval (IR), and passage ranking. However, current state-of-the-art results heavily lean on the capabilities of the LLM being used. Currently, proprietary, and very large LLMs such as GPT-4 are the highest performing passage re-rankers. Hence, users without the resources to leverage top of the line LLMs, or ones that are closed source, are at a disadvantage. In this paper, we investigate the use of a pre-filtering step before passage re-ranking in IR. Our experiments show that by using a small number of human generated relevance scores, coupled with LLM relevance scoring, it is effectively possible to filter out irrelevant passages before re-ranking. Our experiments also show that this pre-filtering then allows the LLM to perform significantly better at the re-ranking task. Indeed, our results show that smaller models such as Mixtral can become competitive with much larger proprietary models (e.g., ChatGPT and GPT-4).
title Re-Ranking Step by Step: Investigating Pre-Filtering for Re-Ranking with Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18740