A Large-Scale Study of Relevance Assessments with Large Language Models: An Initial Look

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Main Authors: Upadhyay, Shivani, Pradeep, Ronak, Thakur, Nandan, Campos, Daniel, Craswell, Nick, Soboroff, Ian, Dang, Hoa Trang, Lin, Jimmy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Upadhyay, Shivani
Pradeep, Ronak
Thakur, Nandan
Campos, Daniel
Craswell, Nick
Soboroff, Ian
Dang, Hoa Trang
Lin, Jimmy
author_facet Upadhyay, Shivani
Pradeep, Ronak
Thakur, Nandan
Campos, Daniel
Craswell, Nick
Soboroff, Ian
Dang, Hoa Trang
Lin, Jimmy
contents The application of large language models to provide relevance assessments presents exciting opportunities to advance information retrieval, natural language processing, and beyond, but to date many unknowns remain. This paper reports on the results of a large-scale evaluation (the TREC 2024 RAG Track) where four different relevance assessment approaches were deployed in situ: the "standard" fully manual process that NIST has implemented for decades and three different alternatives that take advantage of LLMs to different extents using the open-source UMBRELA tool. This setup allows us to correlate system rankings induced by the different approaches to characterize tradeoffs between cost and quality. We find that in terms of nDCG@20, nDCG@100, and Recall@100, system rankings induced by automatically generated relevance assessments from UMBRELA correlate highly with those induced by fully manual assessments across a diverse set of 77 runs from 19 teams. Our results suggest that automatically generated UMBRELA judgments can replace fully manual judgments to accurately capture run-level effectiveness. Surprisingly, we find that LLM assistance does not appear to increase correlation with fully manual assessments, suggesting that costs associated with human-in-the-loop processes do not bring obvious tangible benefits. Overall, human assessors appear to be stricter than UMBRELA in applying relevance criteria. Our work validates the use of LLMs in academic TREC-style evaluations and provides the foundation for future studies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_08275
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Large-Scale Study of Relevance Assessments with Large Language Models: An Initial Look
Upadhyay, Shivani
Pradeep, Ronak
Thakur, Nandan
Campos, Daniel
Craswell, Nick
Soboroff, Ian
Dang, Hoa Trang
Lin, Jimmy
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
The application of large language models to provide relevance assessments presents exciting opportunities to advance information retrieval, natural language processing, and beyond, but to date many unknowns remain. This paper reports on the results of a large-scale evaluation (the TREC 2024 RAG Track) where four different relevance assessment approaches were deployed in situ: the "standard" fully manual process that NIST has implemented for decades and three different alternatives that take advantage of LLMs to different extents using the open-source UMBRELA tool. This setup allows us to correlate system rankings induced by the different approaches to characterize tradeoffs between cost and quality. We find that in terms of nDCG@20, nDCG@100, and Recall@100, system rankings induced by automatically generated relevance assessments from UMBRELA correlate highly with those induced by fully manual assessments across a diverse set of 77 runs from 19 teams. Our results suggest that automatically generated UMBRELA judgments can replace fully manual judgments to accurately capture run-level effectiveness. Surprisingly, we find that LLM assistance does not appear to increase correlation with fully manual assessments, suggesting that costs associated with human-in-the-loop processes do not bring obvious tangible benefits. Overall, human assessors appear to be stricter than UMBRELA in applying relevance criteria. Our work validates the use of LLMs in academic TREC-style evaluations and provides the foundation for future studies.
title A Large-Scale Study of Relevance Assessments with Large Language Models: An Initial Look
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08275