CoRank: LLM-Based Compact Reranking with Document Features for Scientific Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tian, Runchu, Xu, Xueqiang, Jin, Bowen, Kang, SeongKu, Han, Jiawei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912540471066624
author Tian, Runchu
Xu, Xueqiang
Jin, Bowen
Kang, SeongKu
Han, Jiawei
author_facet Tian, Runchu
Xu, Xueqiang
Jin, Bowen
Kang, SeongKu
Han, Jiawei
contents Scientific retrieval is essential for advancing scientific knowledge discovery. Within this process, document reranking plays a critical role in refining first-stage retrieval results. However, standard LLM listwise reranking faces challenges in the scientific domain. First-stage retrieval is often suboptimal in the scientific domain, so relevant documents are ranked lower. Meanwhile, conventional listwise reranking places the full text of candidates into the context window, limiting the number of candidates that can be considered. As a result, many relevant documents are excluded before reranking, constraining overall retrieval performance. To address these challenges, we explore semantic-feature-based compact document representations (e.g., categories, sections, and keywords) and propose CoRank, a training-free, model-agnostic reranking framework for scientific retrieval. It presents a three-stage solution: (i) offline extraction of document features, (ii) coarse-grained reranking using these compact representations, and (iii) fine-grained reranking on full texts of the top candidates from (ii). This integrated process addresses suboptimal first-stage retrieval: Compact representations allow more documents to fit within the context window, improving candidate set coverage, while the final fine-grained ranking ensures a more accurate ordering. Experiments on 5 academic retrieval datasets show that CoRank significantly improves reranking performance across different LLM backbones (average nDCG@10 from 50.6 to 55.5). Overall, these results underscore the synergistic interaction between information extraction and information retrieval, demonstrating how structured semantic features can enhance reranking in the scientific domain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13757
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoRank: LLM-Based Compact Reranking with Document Features for Scientific Retrieval
Tian, Runchu
Xu, Xueqiang
Jin, Bowen
Kang, SeongKu
Han, Jiawei
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Scientific retrieval is essential for advancing scientific knowledge discovery. Within this process, document reranking plays a critical role in refining first-stage retrieval results. However, standard LLM listwise reranking faces challenges in the scientific domain. First-stage retrieval is often suboptimal in the scientific domain, so relevant documents are ranked lower. Meanwhile, conventional listwise reranking places the full text of candidates into the context window, limiting the number of candidates that can be considered. As a result, many relevant documents are excluded before reranking, constraining overall retrieval performance. To address these challenges, we explore semantic-feature-based compact document representations (e.g., categories, sections, and keywords) and propose CoRank, a training-free, model-agnostic reranking framework for scientific retrieval. It presents a three-stage solution: (i) offline extraction of document features, (ii) coarse-grained reranking using these compact representations, and (iii) fine-grained reranking on full texts of the top candidates from (ii). This integrated process addresses suboptimal first-stage retrieval: Compact representations allow more documents to fit within the context window, improving candidate set coverage, while the final fine-grained ranking ensures a more accurate ordering. Experiments on 5 academic retrieval datasets show that CoRank significantly improves reranking performance across different LLM backbones (average nDCG@10 from 50.6 to 55.5). Overall, these results underscore the synergistic interaction between information extraction and information retrieval, demonstrating how structured semantic features can enhance reranking in the scientific domain.
title CoRank: LLM-Based Compact Reranking with Document Features for Scientific Retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13757