13 papers
Towards Critical IR Theories and Practices
Bhaskar Mitra
Belkin and Robertson urged us, half a century ago, to develop a theoretical foundation for understanding what constitutes societal good that can inform information retrieval (IR) r…
From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion
Sajad Ebrahimi, Bhaskar Mitra, Negar Arabzadeh +4
In information retrieval (IR), learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally limited themselves to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the…
PolyAlign: Conditional Human-Distribution Alignment
L. D. M. S. Sai Teja, Ufaq Khan, Sathira Silva +2
Post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization typically align language models toward a single global assistant behavior. While effective fo…
Emancipatory Information Retrieval
Bhaskar Mitra
Our world today is facing a confluence of several mutually reinforcing crises each of which intersects with concerns of social justice and emancipation. This paper is a provocation…
Towards Understanding Bias in Synthetic Data for Evaluation
Hossein A. Rahmani, Varsha Ramineni, Emine Yilmaz +2
Test collections are crucial for evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Creating a diverse set of user queries for these collections can be challenging, and obtaining relev…
Overview of the TREC 2022 deep learning track
Nick Craswell, Bhaskar Mitra, Emine Yilmaz +4
This is the fourth year of the TREC Deep Learning track. As in previous years, we leverage the MS MARCO datasets that made hundreds of thousands of human annotated training labels…