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Main Authors: Dewan, Mouly, Liu, Jiqun, Shah, Chirag
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08965
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author Dewan, Mouly
Liu, Jiqun
Shah, Chirag
author_facet Dewan, Mouly
Liu, Jiqun
Shah, Chirag
contents In the information retrieval (IR) domain, evaluation plays a crucial role in optimizing search experiences and supporting diverse user intents. In the recent LLM era, research has been conducted to automate document relevance labels, as these labels have traditionally been assigned by crowd-sourced workers - a process that is both time and consuming and costly. This study focuses on LLM-generated usefulness labels, a crucial evaluation metric that considers the user's search intents and task objectives, an aspect where relevance falls short. Our experiment utilizes task-level, query-level, and document-level features along with user search behavior signals, which are essential in defining the usefulness of a document. Our research finds that (i) pre-trained LLMs can generate moderate usefulness labels by understanding the comprehensive search task session, (ii) pre-trained LLMs perform better judgement in short search sessions when provided with search session contexts. Additionally, we investigated whether LLMs can capture the unique divergence between relevance and usefulness, along with conducting an ablation study to identify the most critical metrics for accurate usefulness label generation. In conclusion, this work explores LLM-generated usefulness labels by evaluating critical metrics and optimizing for practicality in real-world settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08965
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-Driven Usefulness Labeling for IR Evaluation
Dewan, Mouly
Liu, Jiqun
Shah, Chirag
Information Retrieval
In the information retrieval (IR) domain, evaluation plays a crucial role in optimizing search experiences and supporting diverse user intents. In the recent LLM era, research has been conducted to automate document relevance labels, as these labels have traditionally been assigned by crowd-sourced workers - a process that is both time and consuming and costly. This study focuses on LLM-generated usefulness labels, a crucial evaluation metric that considers the user's search intents and task objectives, an aspect where relevance falls short. Our experiment utilizes task-level, query-level, and document-level features along with user search behavior signals, which are essential in defining the usefulness of a document. Our research finds that (i) pre-trained LLMs can generate moderate usefulness labels by understanding the comprehensive search task session, (ii) pre-trained LLMs perform better judgement in short search sessions when provided with search session contexts. Additionally, we investigated whether LLMs can capture the unique divergence between relevance and usefulness, along with conducting an ablation study to identify the most critical metrics for accurate usefulness label generation. In conclusion, this work explores LLM-generated usefulness labels by evaluating critical metrics and optimizing for practicality in real-world settings.
title LLM-Driven Usefulness Labeling for IR Evaluation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08965