LLM-Assisted Pseudo-Relevance Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Otero, David, Parapar, Javier
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Otero, David
Parapar, Javier
author_facet Otero, David
Parapar, Javier
contents Query expansion is a long-standing technique to mitigate vocabulary mismatch in ad hoc Information Retrieval. Pseudo-relevance feedback methods, such as RM3, estimate an expanded query model from the top-ranked documents, but remain vulnerable to topic drift when early results include noisy or tangential content. Recent approaches instead prompt Large Language Models to generate synthetic expansions or query variants. While effective, these methods risk hallucinations and misalignment with collection-specific terminology. We propose a hybrid alternative that preserves the robustness and interpretability of classical PRF while leveraging LLM semantic judgement. Our method inserts an LLM-based filtering stage prior to RM3 estimation: the LLM judges the documents in the initial top-$k$ ranking, and RM3 is computed only over those accepted as relevant. This simple intervention improves over blind PRF and a strong baseline across several datasets and metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_11238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-Assisted Pseudo-Relevance Feedback
Otero, David
Parapar, Javier
Information Retrieval
Query expansion is a long-standing technique to mitigate vocabulary mismatch in ad hoc Information Retrieval. Pseudo-relevance feedback methods, such as RM3, estimate an expanded query model from the top-ranked documents, but remain vulnerable to topic drift when early results include noisy or tangential content. Recent approaches instead prompt Large Language Models to generate synthetic expansions or query variants. While effective, these methods risk hallucinations and misalignment with collection-specific terminology. We propose a hybrid alternative that preserves the robustness and interpretability of classical PRF while leveraging LLM semantic judgement. Our method inserts an LLM-based filtering stage prior to RM3 estimation: the LLM judges the documents in the initial top-$k$ ranking, and RM3 is computed only over those accepted as relevant. This simple intervention improves over blind PRF and a strong baseline across several datasets and metrics.
title LLM-Assisted Pseudo-Relevance Feedback
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11238