Related papers: Beyond Relevance: Evaluate and Improve Retrievers …

In evaluation campaigns, participants often explore variations of popular, state-of-the-art baselines as a low-risk strategy to achieve competitive results. While effective, this can lead to local "hill climbing" rather than more radical…

Reliable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend fundamentally on the retriever's ability to find relevant information. We show that neural retrievers used in RAG systems have blind spots, which we define as the failure to…

In a number of information retrieval applications (e.g., patent search, literature review, due diligence, etc.), preventing false negatives is more important than preventing false positives. However, approaches designed to reduce review…

The goal of a technology-assisted review is to achieve high recall with low human effort. Continuous active learning algorithms have demonstrated good performance in locating the majority of relevant documents in a collection, however their…

This article presents a summary graph to show the relationships between Information Retrieval (IR) and other related disciplines. The figure tells the key differences between them and the conditions under which one would transition into…

Background: Relevance to industry and scientific rigor have long been an area of friction in IS research. However little work has been done on how to evaluate IS research relevance. Kitchenham et al [13] proposed one of the few relevance…

Getting relevant information from search engines has been the heart of research works in information retrieval. Query expansion is a retrieval technique that has been studied and proved to yield positive results in relevance. Users are…

In the task of information retrieval the term relevance is taken to mean formal conformity of a document given by the retrieval system to user's information query. As a rule, the documents found by the retrieval system should be submitted…

With the growing success of reasoning models across complex natural language tasks, researchers in the Information Retrieval (IR) community have begun exploring how similar reasoning capabilities can be integrated into passage rerankers…

Machine Reading at Scale (MRS) is a challenging task in which a system is given an input query and is asked to produce a precise output by "reading" information from a large knowledge base. The task has gained popularity with its natural…

BERT-based text ranking models have dramatically advanced the state-of-the-art in ad-hoc retrieval, wherein most models tend to consider individual query-document pairs independently. In the mean time, the importance and usefulness to…

Retrieving relevant tables from extensive databases for a given natural language query is essential for accurately answering questions in tasks such as text-to-SQL. Existing table retrieval approaches select a pre-determined set of k tables…

One key consequence of the information revolution is a significant increase and a contamination of our information supply. The practice of fact checking won't suffice to eliminate the biases in text data we observe, as the degree of…

Retrieval systems are essential to contemporary AI pipelines, although most confuse two separate processes: finding relevant information and giving enough context for reasoning. We introduce the Search-Is-Not-Retrieve (SINR) framework, a…

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models…

Millions of consumers search for products online each day, aiming to find items that meet their needs at an acceptable price. While price and quality are major factors in purchasing decisions, ethical considerations increasingly influence…

Neural retrievers are effective but brittle: underspecified or ambiguous queries can misdirect ranking even when relevant documents exist. Existing approaches address this brittleness only partially: LLMs rewrite queries without retriever…

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have been applied to document ranking for information retrieval, which first pre-train a general language model on an unlabeled large corpus and then conduct ranking-specific fine-tuning on…