collaborators

6 papers

cs.CL2026

GEM: A Generative Embedding Model Bridging Reasoning and Retrieval

Zhili Shen, Craig Macdonald

Modern LLMs excel at reasoning and instruction following, enabling users to express complex and diverse information needs. However, conventional retrievers largely rely on surface-…

cs.IR2026

A Sensitivity-Aware Test Collection for Search Among Personal Information

Jack McKechnie, Graham McDonald, Craig Macdonald

Traditional search tasks aim to satisfy user information needs by returning a subset of a collection of documents, ranked by the documents' relevance to a user query. However, some…

cs.IR2025

Am I on the Right Track? What Can Predicted Query Performance Tell Us about the Search Behaviour of Agentic RAG

Fangzheng Tian, Jinyuan Fang, Debasis Ganguly +2

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a new paradigm where the reasoning model decides when to invoke a retriever (as a "tool") when answering a question. This paradigm,…

cs.IR2025

Constructing and Evaluating Declarative RAG Pipelines in PyTerrier

Craig Macdonald, Jinyuan Fang, Andrew Parry +1

Search engines often follow a pipeline architecture, where complex but effective reranking components are used to refine the results of an initial retrieval. Retrieval augmented ge…

cs.CL2025

KiRAG: Knowledge-Driven Iterative Retriever for Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Jinyuan Fang, Zaiqiao Meng, Craig Macdonald

Iterative retrieval-augmented generation (iRAG) models offer an effective approach for multi-hop question answering (QA). However, their retrieval process faces two key challenges:…

cs.IR2025

Is Relevance Propagated from Retriever to Generator in RAG?

Fangzheng Tian, Debasis Ganguly, Craig Macdonald

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework for incorporating external knowledge, usually in the form of a set of documents retrieved from a collection, as a part of a prom…