Systematic Evaluation of Neural Retrieval Models on the Touché 2020 Argument Retrieval Subset of BEIR

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Hauptverfasser: Thakur, Nandan, Bonifacio, Luiz, Fröbe, Maik, Bondarenko, Alexander, Kamalloo, Ehsan, Potthast, Martin, Hagen, Matthias, Lin, Jimmy
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Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Thakur, Nandan
Bonifacio, Luiz
Fröbe, Maik
Bondarenko, Alexander
Kamalloo, Ehsan
Potthast, Martin
Hagen, Matthias
Lin, Jimmy
author_facet Thakur, Nandan
Bonifacio, Luiz
Fröbe, Maik
Bondarenko, Alexander
Kamalloo, Ehsan
Potthast, Martin
Hagen, Matthias
Lin, Jimmy
contents The zero-shot effectiveness of neural retrieval models is often evaluated on the BEIR benchmark -- a combination of different IR evaluation datasets. Interestingly, previous studies found that particularly on the BEIR subset Touché 2020, an argument retrieval task, neural retrieval models are considerably less effective than BM25. Still, so far, no further investigation has been conducted on what makes argument retrieval so "special". To more deeply analyze the respective potential limits of neural retrieval models, we run a reproducibility study on the Touché 2020 data. In our study, we focus on two experiments: (i) a black-box evaluation (i.e., no model retraining), incorporating a theoretical exploration using retrieval axioms, and (ii) a data denoising evaluation involving post-hoc relevance judgments. Our black-box evaluation reveals an inherent bias of neural models towards retrieving short passages from the Touché 2020 data, and we also find that quite a few of the neural models' results are unjudged in the Touché 2020 data. As many of the short Touché passages are not argumentative and thus non-relevant per se, and as the missing judgments complicate fair comparison, we denoise the Touché 2020 data by excluding very short passages (less than 20 words) and by augmenting the unjudged data with post-hoc judgments following the Touché guidelines. On the denoised data, the effectiveness of the neural models improves by up to 0.52 in nDCG@10, but BM25 is still more effective. Our code and the augmented Touché 2020 dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/castorini/touche-error-analysis}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07790
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Systematic Evaluation of Neural Retrieval Models on the Touché 2020 Argument Retrieval Subset of BEIR
Thakur, Nandan
Bonifacio, Luiz
Fröbe, Maik
Bondarenko, Alexander
Kamalloo, Ehsan
Potthast, Martin
Hagen, Matthias
Lin, Jimmy
Information Retrieval
The zero-shot effectiveness of neural retrieval models is often evaluated on the BEIR benchmark -- a combination of different IR evaluation datasets. Interestingly, previous studies found that particularly on the BEIR subset Touché 2020, an argument retrieval task, neural retrieval models are considerably less effective than BM25. Still, so far, no further investigation has been conducted on what makes argument retrieval so "special". To more deeply analyze the respective potential limits of neural retrieval models, we run a reproducibility study on the Touché 2020 data. In our study, we focus on two experiments: (i) a black-box evaluation (i.e., no model retraining), incorporating a theoretical exploration using retrieval axioms, and (ii) a data denoising evaluation involving post-hoc relevance judgments. Our black-box evaluation reveals an inherent bias of neural models towards retrieving short passages from the Touché 2020 data, and we also find that quite a few of the neural models' results are unjudged in the Touché 2020 data. As many of the short Touché passages are not argumentative and thus non-relevant per se, and as the missing judgments complicate fair comparison, we denoise the Touché 2020 data by excluding very short passages (less than 20 words) and by augmenting the unjudged data with post-hoc judgments following the Touché guidelines. On the denoised data, the effectiveness of the neural models improves by up to 0.52 in nDCG@10, but BM25 is still more effective. Our code and the augmented Touché 2020 dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/castorini/touche-error-analysis}.
title Systematic Evaluation of Neural Retrieval Models on the Touché 2020 Argument Retrieval Subset of BEIR
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07790