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Hybrid Pooling with LLMs via Relevance Context Learning

sigir26-145 · Full research paper · David Otero, Javier Parapar
Test Collection Construction and Poo · 50% LLM-Based Relevance Assessment · 50%
Abstract

High-quality relevance judgements over large query sets are essential for evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems, yet manual annotation remains costly and time-consuming. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise as automatic relevance assessors, but their reliability is still limited. Most existing approaches rely on zero-shot prompting or in-context learning (ICL) with a small number of labelled examples. However, standard ICL treats examples as independent instances and fails to explicitly capture the underlying relevance criteria of a topic, restricting its ability to generalise to unseen query-document pairs. To address this limitation, we introduce Relevance Context Learning (RCL), a novel framework that leverages human relevance judgements to explicitly model topic-specific relevance criteria. Rather than directly using labelled examples for in-context prediction, RCL first prompts an LLM (Instructor LLM) to analyse sets of judged query-document pairs and generate explicit narratives that describe what constitutes relevance for a given topic. These relevance narratives are then used as structured prompts to guide a second LLM (Assessor LLM) in producing relevance judgements. To evaluate RCL in a realistic data collection setting, we propose a hybrid pooling strategy in which a shallow depth-k pool from participating systems is judged by human assessors, while the remaining documents are labelled by LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that RCL substantially outperforms zero-shot prompting and consistently improves over standard ICL. Overall, our findings indicate that transforming relevance examples into explicit, context-aware relevance narratives is a more effective way of exploiting human judgements for LLM-based IR dataset construction.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Paul Thomas 0001
70
73 System Comparison Using Automated Generation of Relevance Judgements in Multiple Languages (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
73 LLM4Eval@WSDM 2025: Large Language Model for Evaluation in Information Retrieval (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
73 LLM4Eval: Large Language Model for Evaluation in IR (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
2 Tetsuya Sakai
60
73 Relevance Assessments for Web Search Evaluation: Should We Randomise or Prioritise the Pooled Documents? (2022) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
73 WWW3E8: 259, 000 Relevance Labels for Studying the Effect of Document Presentation Order for Relevance Assessors (2021) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
73 On the Ordering of Pooled Web Pages, Gold Assessments, and Bronze Assessments (2024) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
3 Andrew Parry
46
73 Variations in Relevance Judgments and the Shelf Life of Test Collections (2025) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
62 Large Language Model Relevance Assessors Agree With One Another More Than With Human Assessors (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
52 Corpus Subsampling: Estimating the Effectiveness of Neural Retrieval Models on Large Corpora (2025) Evaluation Resources and Tools

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Zhijing Wu 0001 37
Area-chair candidates (7)
Zhijing Wu 0001 assigned 379 papers
Xiaoxi Li 0005 3715 papers
Fernando Diaz 0001 3712 papers
Jun Xu 0001 362 papers
Hongjin Qian 3612 papers
Kam-Fai Wong 356 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 354 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Paul Thomas 0001 assigned 70 3
73 System Comparison Using Automated Generation of Relevance Judgements in Multiple Languages (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
73 LLM4Eval@WSDM 2025: Large Language Model for Evaluation in Information Retrieval (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
2 Tetsuya Sakai assigned 60 3
73 Relevance Assessments for Web Search Evaluation: Should We Randomise or Prioritise the Pooled Documents? (2022) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
73 WWW3E8: 259, 000 Relevance Labels for Studying the Effect of Document Presentation Order for Relevance Assessors (2021) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
3 Falk Scholer 52 3
73 UQV100: A Test Collection with Query Variability (2016) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
73 TREC: topic engineering exercise (2014) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
4 Mark D. Smucker 49 3
73 Optimizing Nugget Annotations with Active Learning (2016) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
73 Dynamic Sampling Meets Pooling (2019) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
5 Andrew Parry assigned 46 3
73 Variations in Relevance Judgments and the Shelf Life of Test Collections (2025) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
62 Large Language Model Relevance Assessors Agree With One Another More Than With Human Assessors (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
6 Negar Arabzadeh 46 3
73 MS MARCO Chameleons: Challenging the MS MARCO Leaderboard with Extremely Obstinate Queries (2021) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
63 LLM-as-a-Judge in Entity Retrieval: Assessing Explicit and Implicit Relevance (2025) Entity Linking and Alignment
7 Rolf Jagerman 41 3
73 Reliable Confidence Intervals for Information Retrieval Evaluation Using Generative A.I (2024) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
65 Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024) LLM-Based Reranking
8 Weiwei Sun 0001 40 3
52 MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools
46 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
9 Leif Azzopardi 39 3
67 Retrievability Bias Estimation Using Synthetically Generated Queries (2023) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
42 Query Variation Performance Prediction for Systematic Reviews (2018) Query Performance Prediction
10 Yuchen Li 0006 38 3
45 FULTR: A Large-Scale Fusion Learning to Rank Dataset and Its Application for Satisfaction-Oriented Ranking (2025) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
40 Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
11 Zhen Qin 0001 38 3
65 Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024) LLM-Based Reranking
42 Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index (2022) Generative Retrieval
12 Daiting Shi 38 3
71 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
48 MA4DIV: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Search Result Diversification (2025) Evaluation Metrics and User Models
13 Idan Szpektor 38 3
42 From query to question in one click: suggesting synthetic questions to searchers (2013) Query Reformulation and Expansion
42 Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates (2011) Query Reformulation and Expansion
15 Jaime Arguello 37 3
63 Tip of the Tongue Query Elicitation for Simulated Evaluation (2025) User Simulation for Interactive Systems
63 Multilingual and Domain-Agnostic Tip-of-the-Tongue Query Generation for Simulated Evaluation (2026) User Simulation for Interactive Systems
16 Ruqing Zhang 0001 37 3
42 Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance (2024) Generative Retrieval
42 CorpusBrain: Pre-train a Generative Retrieval Model for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (2022) Generative Retrieval
17 Shengyao Zhuang 37 3
46 R2LLMs: Retrieval and Ranking with LLMs (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
40 Leveraging LLMs for Unsupervised Dense Retriever Ranking (2024) Query Performance Prediction
18 Gustavo Penha 37 3
62 As It Was: Aligning LLM Search Evaluation with Historical User Preferences (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
40 Improving Content Retrievability in Search with Controllable Query Generation (2023) Query Reformulation and Expansion
20 Chen Zhao 0013 37 3
42 SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
41 A dataset and baselines for sequential open-domain question answering (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
21 Shuaiqiang Wang 37 3
42 Model Editing for New Document Integration in Generative Information Retrieval (2026) Generative Retrieval
40 Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
22 Farzad Shami 37 3
49 Doctron: A Web-based Collaborative Annotation Tool for Ground Truth Creation in IR (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
41 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
24 Mariano Barone 37 3
41 A Multilingual Multimodal Medical Examination Dataset for Visual Question Answering in Healthcare (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
36 AMICO: A Semantic and Multimodal Framework for AI-Assisted Clinical Reporting (2025) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
25 Venktesh V 37 3
47 Understanding the User: An Intent-Based Ranking Dataset (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion
45 ir_explain: A Python Library of Explainable IR Methods (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
26 Xiao Wang 0043 37 3
45 Retrieve, Rerank, Answer, Experiment: Hands-On IR Research with PyTerrier (2026) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
40 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion
27 Di Wu 0054 37 3
40 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
38 VisRet: Visualization Improves Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-Image Retrieval (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG
28 Keping Bi 36 3
71 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
44 Beyond Relevance: Utility-Centric Retrieval in the LLM Era (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
29 Yujia Zhou 0002 36 3
42 WebUltron: An Ultimate Retriever on Webpages Under the Model-Centric Paradigm (2024) Generative Retrieval
42 NOVO: Learnable and Interpretable Document Identifiers for Model-Based IR (2023) Generative Retrieval
30 Jing Liu 0022 36 3
42 TOME: A Two-stage Approach for Model-based Retrieval (2023) Generative Retrieval
41 A Regularized Competition Model for Question Difficulty Estimation in Community Question Answering Services (2014) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
31 Xi Ye 0003 36 3
41 Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
38 Connecting Attributions and QA Model Behavior on Realistic Counterfactuals (2021) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
32 Adam Jatowt 36 3
46 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
41 Search Intent Discovery by Structurization of Community QA Contents (2012) Query Reformulation and Expansion
35 Jialong Wu 0007 36 3
41 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion
41 AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion