Analyzing the Effectiveness of Listwise Reranking with Positional Invariance on Temporal Generalizability

TL;DR

This paper evaluates listwise reranking methods, especially ListT5, for their ability to maintain retrieval effectiveness over time in dynamic environments, highlighting their robustness against temporal distribution shifts.

Contribution

It introduces the application of listwise reranking with positional invariance, particularly ListT5, to improve temporal generalizability in IR systems using the LongEval benchmark.

Findings

ListT5 effectively mitigates positional bias.

Listwise reranking improves robustness to temporal shifts.

Performance increases with greater temporal drift.

Abstract

This working note outlines our participation in the retrieval task at CLEF 2024. We highlight the considerable gap between studying retrieval performance on static knowledge documents and understanding performance in real-world environments. Therefore, Addressing these discrepancies and measuring the temporal persistence of IR systems is crucial. By investigating the LongEval benchmark, specifically designed for such dynamic environments, our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of a listwise reranking approach, which proficiently handles inaccuracies induced by temporal distribution shifts. Among listwise rerankers, our findings show that ListT5, which effectively mitigates the positional bias problem by adopting the Fusion-in-Decoder architecture, is especially effective, and more so, as temporal drift increases, on the test-long subset.