Cited by 169Information Retrieval and Search BehaviorTopic ModelingRecommender Systems and Techniques

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Large Language Models can Accurately Predict Searcher Preferences

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Thomas, Paul, Spielman, Seth, Craswell, Nick, Mitra, Bhaskar·2024·Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Abstract

Much of the evaluation and tuning of a search system relies on relevance labels---annotations that say whether a document is useful for a given search and searcher. Ideally these come from real searchers, but it is hard to collect this data at scale, so typical experiments rely on third-party labellers who may or may not produce accurate annotations. Label quality is managed with ongoing auditing, training, and monitoring. We discuss an alternative approach. We take careful feedback from real searchers and use this to select a large language model (LLM), and prompt, that agrees with this feedback; the LLM can then produce labels at scale. Our experiments show LLMs are as accurate as human labellers and as useful for finding the best systems and hardest queries. LLM performance varies with prompt features, but also varies unpredictably with simple paraphrases. This unpredictability reinforces the need for high-quality "gold" labels.

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Metadata

Authors
Thomas, P., Spielman, S., Craswell, N., & Mitra, B.
Affiliations
  • Microsoft (United States) (US)
  • Microsoft Research Montréal (Canada) (CA)
Venue
Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Publisher
ACM
Published
2024-07-10
Pages
1930-1940
OpenAlex
W4400526908
Cited by
168
References
27
Citations by year
2026: 42 · 2025: 74 · 2024: 51
FWCI
63.52
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Recommender Systems and Techniques
Keywords
large language models, search evaluation, label quality, user feedback, automatic annotation, prompt engineering, query difficulty

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