Investigating Passage-level Relevance and Its Role in Document-level Relevance Judgment
Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval(2019)
摘要
The understanding of the process of relevance judgment helps to inspire the design of retrieval models. Traditional retrieval models usually estimate relevance based on document-level signals. Recent works consider a more fine-grain, passage-level relevance information, which can further enhance retrieval performance. However, it lacks a detailed analysis of how passage-level relevance signals determine or influence the relevance judgment of the whole document. To investigate the role of passage-level relevance in the document-level relevance judgment, we construct an ad-hoc retrieval dataset with both passage-level and document-level relevance labels. A thorough analysis reveals that: 1) there is a strong correlation between the document-level relevance and the fractions of irrelevant passages to highly relevant passages; 2) the position, length and query similarity of passages play different roles in the determination of document-level relevance; 3) The sequential passage-level relevance within a document is a potential indicator for the document-level relevance. Based on the relationship between passage-level and document-level relevance, we also show that utilizing passage-level relevance signals can improve existing document ranking models. This study helps us better understand how users perceive relevance for a document and inspire the designing of novel ranking models leveraging fine-grain, passage-level relevance signals.
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关键词
passage-level relevance aggregation, relevance judgment, relevance model
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