A central task in information retrieval and the NLP communities is relevance modeling, which aims to rank documents based on their expressed information needs Many knowledge-intensive retrieval tasks are powered by a first-stage retrieval stage for context selection, followed by a more involved task-specific model. However, using this filtering (cascading) approach inherently limits the recall of subsequent stages. Recently, adaptive re-ranking techniques have been proposed to overcome this issue by continually selecting documents from the whole corpus, rather than only considering an initial pool of documents. However, so far these approaches have been limited to heuristic design choices, particularly in terms of the criteria for document selection. In this work, we propose a unifying view of the nascent area of adaptive retrieval by proposing Quam, a query-affinity model of adaptive re-ranking that includes two complementary components: (1) a more principled algorithm for document selection, and (2) a data-driven approach to model document co-relevance during indexing. Our extensive experimental evidence shows that our proposed approach improves the recall performance by up to 26% over the standard re-ranking baselines. Further, the query affinity modelling and relevance-aware document graph components can be injected into any adaptive retrieval approach. The experimental results show the existing adaptive retrieval approach improves recall by up to 12%. ... Read more

Advanced relevance models, such as those that use large language models (LLMs), provide highly accurate relevance estimations. However, their computational costs make them infeasible for processing large document corpora. To address this, retrieval systems often employ a telescoping approach, where computationally efficient but less precise lexical and semantic retrievers filter potential candidates for further ranking. However, this approach heavily depends on the quality of early-stage retrieval, which can potentially exclude relevant documents early in the process. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for re-ranking called online relevance estimation that continuously updates relevance estimates for a query throughout the ranking process. Instead of re-ranking a fixed set of top-k documents in a single step, online relevance estimation iteratively re-scores smaller subsets of the most promising documents while adjusting relevance scores for the remaining pool based on the estimations from the final model using an online bandit-based algorithm. This dynamic process mitigates the recall limitations of telescoping systems by re-prioritizing documents initially deemed less relevant by earlier stages-including those completely excluded by earlier-stage retrievers. We validate our approach on TREC benchmarks under two scenarios: hybrid retrieval and adaptive retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is sample-efficient and significantly improves recall, highlighting the effectiveness of our online relevance estimation framework for modern search systems. ... Read more

Evaluating the interactions between users and systems presents many challenges. Simulation offers a reliable, re-usable, and repeatable methodology to explore how different users, user behaviours and/or retrieval systems impact performance. With Large Language Models and Generative AI now widely available and accessible, new affordances are possible. These allow researchers to create more ''realistic'' simulated users that can generate queries and judge items like humans, and to develop new retrieval systems where responses and interactions are conversational and based on retrieval augmented generation. This resource paper presents a community-led initiative to update the Simulation of Interactive Information Retrieval (SimIIR) Framework to enable the simulation of conversational search using LLMs. The largest update provides a conversational search workflow which involves a number of new possible interactions with a search system or agent - enabling a host of new development and evaluation opportunities. Other developments include the Markovian Users, Cognitive States, LLM-based components for assessing snippets/documents/responses, generating queries, deciding on when to stop/continue, and PyTerrier integration. This paper aims to mark the release of SimIIR 3.0 and invites the community to build, extend, and use the resource. ... Read more