MultiConIR: Towards Multi-Condition Information Retrieval

Xuan Lu, Sifan Liu, Bochao Yin, Yongqi Li, Xinghao Chen, Hui Su, Yaohui Jin, Wenjun Zeng, Xiaoyu Shen


Abstract
Multi-condition information retrieval (IR) presents a significant, yet underexplored challenge for existing systems. This paper introduces MultiConIR, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios across five diverse domains. We systematically assess model capabilities through three critical tasks: complexity robustness, relevance monotonicity, and query format sensitivity. Our extensive experiments on 15 models reveal a critical vulnerability: most retrievers and rerankers exhibit severe performance degradation as query complexity increases. Key deficiencies include widespread failure to maintain relevance monotonicity, and high sensitivity to query style and condition placement. The superior performance GPT-4o reveals the performance gap between IR systems and advanced LLM for handling sophisticated natural language queries. Furthermore, this work delves into the factors contributing to reranker performance deterioration and examines how condition positioning within queries affects similarity assessment, providing crucial insights for advancing IR systems towards complex search scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.726
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13471–13494
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.726/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.726
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuan Lu, Sifan Liu, Bochao Yin, Yongqi Li, Xinghao Chen, Hui Su, Yaohui Jin, Wenjun Zeng, and Xiaoyu Shen. 2025. MultiConIR: Towards Multi-Condition Information Retrieval. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 13471–13494, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MultiConIR: Towards Multi-Condition Information Retrieval (Lu et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.726.pdf
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