PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs

Andrew Drozdov, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler, Kai Hui


Abstract
Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) can be instructed to effectively perform zero-shot passage re-ranking, in which the results of a first stage retrieval method, such as BM25, are rated and reordered to improve relevance. In this work, we improve LLM-based re-ranking by algorithmically selecting few-shot demonstrations to include in the prompt. Our analysis investigates the conditions where demonstrations are most helpful, and shows that adding even one demonstration is significantly beneficial. We propose a novel demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than the commonly used semantic similarity. Furthermore, we find that demonstrations helpful for ranking are also effective at question generation. We hope our work will spur more principled research into question generation and passage ranking.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.950
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14242–14252
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.950
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.950
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrew Drozdov, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler, and Kai Hui. 2023. PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 14242–14252, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs (Drozdov et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.950.pdf