Few-shot Prompting for Pairwise Ranking: An Effective Non-Parametric Retrieval Model
Nilanjan Sinhababu, Andrew Parry, Debasis Ganguly, Debasis Samanta, Pabitra Mitra
Abstract
A supervised ranking model, despite its effectiveness over traditional approaches, usually involves complex processing - typically multiple stages of task-specific pre-training and fine-tuning. This has motivated researchers to explore simpler pipelines leveraging large language models (LLMs) that can work in a zero-shot manner. However, since zero-shot inference does not make use of a training set of pairs of queries and their relevant documents, its performance is mostly worse than that of supervised models, which are trained on such example pairs. Motivated by the existing findings that training examples generally improve zero-shot performance, in our work, we explore if this also applies to ranking models. More specifically, given a query and a pair of documents, the preference prediction task is improved by augmenting examples of preferences for similar queries from a training set. Our proposed pairwise few-shot ranker demonstrates consistent improvements over the zero-shot baseline on both in-domain (TREC DL) and out-domain (BEIR subset) retrieval benchmarks.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.findings-emnlp.720
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Miami, Florida, USA
- Editors:
- Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 12363–12377
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/icon-24-ingestion/2024.findings-emnlp.720/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.720
- Cite (ACL):
- Nilanjan Sinhababu, Andrew Parry, Debasis Ganguly, Debasis Samanta, and Pabitra Mitra. 2024. Few-shot Prompting for Pairwise Ranking: An Effective Non-Parametric Retrieval Model. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12363–12377, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Few-shot Prompting for Pairwise Ranking: An Effective Non-Parametric Retrieval Model (Sinhababu et al., Findings 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/icon-24-ingestion/2024.findings-emnlp.720.pdf