Hybrid Pooling with LLMs via Relevance Context Learning
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 37 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Zhijing Wu 0001 assigned | 37 | 9 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 37 | 15 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 37 | 12 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 36 | 2 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 36 | 12 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 35 | 6 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 35 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |