PRP-Graph: Pairwise Ranking Prompting to LLMs with Graph Aggregation for Effective Text Re-ranking

Jian Luo, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Le Sun


Abstract
Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) demonstrates impressive effectiveness in zero-shot document re-ranking tasks with large language models (LLMs). However, in the existing methods, PRP only outputs the same label for the comparison results of different confidence intervals without considering the uncertainty of pairwise comparison, which implies an underutilization of the generation probability information of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose PRP-Graph, a novel pairwise re-ranking approach, based on a refined scoring PRP unit that exploits the output probabilities of target labels to capture the degree of certainty of the comparison results. Specifically, the PRP-Graph consists of two stages, namely ranking graph construction and ranking graph aggregation. Extensive experiments conducted on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing PRP-based methods. Comprehensive analysis reveals that the PRP-Graph displays strong robustness towards the initial ranking order and delivers exceptional re-ranking results with acceptable efficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Memelank/PRP-Graph.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.313
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5766–5776
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.313
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jian Luo, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, and Le Sun. 2024. PRP-Graph: Pairwise Ranking Prompting to LLMs with Graph Aggregation for Effective Text Re-ranking. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5766–5776, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PRP-Graph: Pairwise Ranking Prompting to LLMs with Graph Aggregation for Effective Text Re-ranking (Luo et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.313.pdf