Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering

Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun


Abstract
Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems often struggle with the quality of retrieved passages, which may contain conflicting information and be misaligned with the reader’s needs. Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but often fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader. In this paper, we introduce a novel Reader-Centered Passage Selection (R-CPS) method, which enhances the performance of the retrieve-then-read pipeline by re-ranking and clustering passages from the reader’s perspective. Our method re-ranks passages based on the reader’s prediction probability distribution and clusters passages according to the predicted answers, prioritizing more useful and relevant passages to the top and reducing inconsistent information. Experiments on ODQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot settings.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.67
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1000–1012
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.67/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, and Le Sun. 2025. Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1000–1012, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (Xin et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.67.pdf