Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels

Bibliographic Details
Title: Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels
Authors: Zhuang, Honglei, Qin, Zhen, Hui, Kai, Wu, Junru, Yan, Le, Wang, Xuanhui, Bendersky, Michael
Publication Year: 2023
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Information Retrieval
More Details: Zero-shot text rankers powered by recent LLMs achieve remarkable ranking performance by simply prompting. Existing prompts for pointwise LLM rankers mostly ask the model to choose from binary relevance labels like "Yes" and "No". However, the lack of intermediate relevance label options may cause the LLM to provide noisy or biased answers for documents that are partially relevant to the query. We propose to incorporate fine-grained relevance labels into the prompt for LLM rankers, enabling them to better differentiate among documents with different levels of relevance to the query and thus derive a more accurate ranking. We study two variants of the prompt template, coupled with different numbers of relevance levels. Our experiments on 8 BEIR data sets show that adding fine-grained relevance labels significantly improves the performance of LLM rankers.
Comment: NAACL 2024; 13 pages
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14122
Accession Number: edsarx.2310.14122
Database: arXiv
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