Related papers: Approximate Recall Confidence Intervals
The traditional evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems is generally very costly as it requires manual relevance annotation from human experts. Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence -- specifically large…
When computing a confidence interval for a binomial proportion p one must choose between using an exact interval, which has a coverage probability of at least 1-{\alpha} for all values of p, and a shorter approximate interval, which may…
Two-sample inference for the difference of population means typically relies upon a Central Limit Theorem approximation. When data are drawn from a Negative Binomial distribution, previous work of Shilane et al. (2010) showed that a Normal…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in document re-ranking, a key component in modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations, including ranking…
Pseudo-relevance feedback mechanisms, from Rocchio to the relevance models, have shown the usefulness of expanding and reweighting the users' initial queries using information occurring in an initial set of retrieved documents, known as the…
Traditionally in the domain of legal research, the retrieval of pertinent citations from intricate case descriptions has demanded manual effort and keyword-based search applications that mandate expertise in understanding legal jargon.…
Following [Diggle 2011, Greenland 1995], we give a simple formula for the Bayesian posterior density of a prevalence parameter based on unreliable testing of a population. This problem is of particular importance when the false positive…
Search-engine date filters are widely used to enforce pre-cutoff retrieval in retrospective evaluations of search-augmented forecasters. We show this approach is unreliable across two major search engines: auditing Google Search's before:…
Ranking methods or models based on their performance is of prime importance but is tricky because performance is fundamentally multidimensional. In the case of classification, precision and recall are scores with probabilistic…
One technique to improve the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine is to expand documents with terms that are related or representative of the documents' content.From the perspective of a question answering system, this might comprise…
This paper reports the use of a document distance-based approach to automatically expand the number of available relevance judgements when these are limited and reduced to only positive judgements. This may happen, for example, when the…
The standard approach to assess reliability of automatic speech transcriptions is through the use of confidence scores. If accurate, these scores provide a flexible mechanism to flag transcription errors for upstream and downstream…
In Bayesian analysis, reference priors are widely recognized for their objective nature. Yet, they often lead to intractable and improper priors, which complicates their application. Besides, informed prior elicitation methods are penalized…
In any ranking system, the retrieval model outputs a single score for a document based on its belief on how relevant it is to a given search query. While retrieval models have continued to improve with the introduction of increasingly…
Relevance feedback techniques assume that users provide relevance judgments for the top k (usually 10) documents and then re-rank using a new query model based on those judgments. Even though this is effective, there has been little…
We propose Referral-Augmented Retrieval (RAR), a simple technique that concatenates document indices with referrals, i.e. text from other documents that cite or link to the given document, to provide significant performance gains for…
This article aims to provide the information retrieval community with some reflections on recent advances in retrieval learning by analyzing the reproducibility of image-text retrieval models. Due to the increase of multimodal data over the…
A new method is proposed for the correction of confidence intervals when the original interval does not have the correct nominal coverage probabilities in the frequentist sense. The proposed method is general and does not require any…
Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…
Building dense retrievers requires a series of standard procedures, including training and validating neural models and creating indexes for efficient search. However, these procedures are often misaligned in that training objectives do not…