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Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs

sigir26-189 · Full research paper · Lukas Gienapp, Martin Potthast, Andrew Yates, Harrisen Scells, Eugene Yang
LLM-Based Relevance Assessment · 100%
Abstract

The unjudged document problem, where systems that did not contribute to the original judgement pool may retrieve documents without a relevance judgement, is a key obstacle to the reuseability of test collections in information retrieval. While the de facto standard to deal with the problem is to treat unjudged documents as non-relevant, many alternatives have been proposed, such as the use of large language models (LLMs) as a relevance judge (LLM-as-a-judge). However, this has been criticized, among other things, as circular, since the same LLM can be used as the ranker and the judge. We propose to train topic-specific relevance classifiers instead: By finetuning monoT5 with independent LoRA weight adaptation on the judgments of a single assessor for a single topic's pool, we align it to that assessor's notion of relevance for the topic. The system rankings obtained through our classifier's relevance judgments achieve a Spearmans' $ρ$ correlation of $>0.94$ with ground truth system rankings. As little as 128 initial human judgments per topic suffice to improve the comparability of models, compared to treating unjudged documents as non-relevant, while achieving more reliability than existing LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Topic-specific relevance classifiers are thus a lightweight and straightforward way to tackle the unjudged document problem, while maintaining human judgments as the gold standard for retrieval evaluation. Code, models, and data are made openly available.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Falk Scholer
43
62 On the Use of LLMs for Relevance Labelling (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
62 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
47 TREC: topic engineering exercise (2014) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
2 Weiwei Sun 0001
39
54 MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools
45 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
43 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Kam-Fai Wong 36
Area-chair candidates (4)
Kam-Fai Wong assigned 366 papers
Fernando Diaz 0001 3612 papers
Xiaoxi Li 0005 3515 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 359 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Paul Thomas 0001 COI: co-author 63 3
100 System Comparison Using Automated Generation of Relevance Judgements in Multiple Languages (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
100 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
2 Tetsuya Sakai 45 3
47 Give me just one highly relevant document: P-measure (2006) Evaluation Metrics and User Models
47 Summaries, ranked retrieval and sessions: a unified framework for information access evaluation (2013) Evaluation Metrics and User Models
3 Negar Arabzadeh 43 3
65 LLM-as-a-Judge in Entity Retrieval: Assessing Explicit and Implicit Relevance (2025) Entity Linking and Alignment
47 MS MARCO Chameleons: Challenging the MS MARCO Leaderboard with Extremely Obstinate Queries (2021) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
4 Falk Scholer assigned 43 3
62 On the Use of LLMs for Relevance Labelling (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
62 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
5 Andrew Parry COI: co-author 41 3
67 Large Language Model Relevance Assessors Agree With One Another More Than With Human Assessors (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
54 Corpus Subsampling: Estimating the Effectiveness of Neural Retrieval Models on Large Corpora (2025) Evaluation Resources and Tools
6 Mark D. Smucker 40 3
54 Evaluating sentence-level relevance feedback for high-recall information retrieval (2020) Evaluation Resources and Tools
54 A Preference Judgment Tool for Authoritative Assessment (2023) Evaluation Resources and Tools
7 Rolf Jagerman 39 3
100 Reliable Confidence Intervals for Information Retrieval Evaluation Using Generative A.I (2024) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment
74 Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024) LLM-Based Reranking
8 Weiwei Sun 0001 assigned 39 3
54 MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools
45 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
9 Yuchen Li 0006 38 3
49 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
47 FULTR: A Large-Scale Fusion Learning to Rank Dataset and Its Application for Satisfaction-Oriented Ranking (2025) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
10 Shengyao Zhuang COI: co-author 38 3
49 Where Relevance Emerges: A Layer-Wise Study of Internal Attention for Zero-Shot Re-Ranking (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
49 A Setwise Approach for Effective and Highly Efficient Zero-shot Ranking with Large Language Models (2024) LLM-Based Reranking
11 Xiao Wang 0043 38 3
46 Retrieve, Rerank, Answer, Experiment: Hands-On IR Research with PyTerrier (2026) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
41 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion
12 Idan Szpektor 37 3
44 Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates (2011) Query Reformulation and Expansion
44 From query to question in one click: suggesting synthetic questions to searchers (2013) Query Reformulation and Expansion
13 Weipeng Chen 37 3
44 RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
42 AITQE: An Adaptive Image-Text Quality Enhancer for Scalable MLLM Pretraining (2026) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
14 Daiting Shi 37 3
69 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
49 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) LLM-Based Reranking
15 Leif Azzopardi COI: co-author 37 3
43 Query Variation Performance Prediction for Systematic Reviews (2018) Query Performance Prediction
43 When is query performance prediction effective? (2009) Query Performance Prediction
16 Farzad Shami 36 3
50 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
17 Shuaiqiang Wang COI: co-author 36 3
41 Model Editing for New Document Integration in Generative Information Retrieval (2026) Generative Retrieval
39 GS2P: A Generative Pre-trained Learning to Rank Model with Over-parameterization for Web-Scale Search (Extended Abstract) (2024) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
18 Di Wu 0054 36 3
39 Active Instruction Tuning: Improving Cross-Task Generalization by Training on Prompt Sensitive Tasks (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation
39 Rethinking Model Selection and Decoding for Keyphrase Generation with Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation
19 Gustavo Penha 36 3
62 As It Was: Aligning LLM Search Evaluation with Historical User Preferences (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
42 PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters (2024) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
21 Zhen Qin 0001 36 3
74 Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024) LLM-Based Reranking
41 Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index (2022) Generative Retrieval
22 Yanzhao Zhang 36 3
49 Progressive Adaptation of Large Language Models for Multilingual Text Ranking (2026) Evaluation Resources and Tools
44 ERank: Fusing Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning for Effective and Efficient Text Reranking (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
23 Xueguang Ma 36 3
44 Resources for Brewing BEIR: Reproducible Reference Models and Statistical Analyses (2024) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
43 Toward Best Practices for Training Multilingual Dense Retrieval Models (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools
24 Haokun Wen 36 3
38 FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
38 A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
25 Chen Zhao 0013 36 3
49 LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025) LLM-Based Reranking
42 Are Multimodal LLMs Robust Against Adversarial Perturbations? RoMMath: A Systematic Evaluation on Multimodal Math Reasoning (2025) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
27 Ruqing Zhang 0001 COI: co-author 36 3
41 Recent Advances in Generative Information Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval
41 Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance (2024) Generative Retrieval
28 Venktesh V 36 3
49 Understanding the User: An Intent-Based Ranking Dataset (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion
46 ir_explain: A Python Library of Explainable IR Methods (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
30 Adam Jatowt 35 3
45 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
42 Search Intent Discovery by Structurization of Community QA Contents (2012) Query Reformulation and Expansion
31 Xi Ye 0003 35 3
41 Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
39 Assessing Out-of-Domain Language Model Performance from Few Examples (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation
32 Zihao Yue 35 3
42 POLYCHARTQA: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models with Multilingual Chart Question Answering (2026) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
42 Less is More: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination from an EOS Decision Perspective (2024) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
34 Jialong Wu 0007 35 3
42 AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion
42 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion