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arXiv · 2506.23191

Impact of Shallow vs. Deep Relevance Judgments on BERT-based Reranking Models

Gabriel Iturra-Bocaz·Danny Vo·Petra Galuscakova
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Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of shallow versus deep relevance judgments on the performance of BERT-based reranking models in neural Information Retrieval. Shallow-judged datasets, characterized by numerous queries each with few relevance judgments, and deep-judged datasets, involving fewer queries with extensive relevance judgments, are compared. The research assesses how these datasets affect the performance of BERT-based reranking models trained on them. The experiments are run on the MS MARCO and LongEval collections. Results indicate that shallow-judged datasets generally enhance generalization and effectiveness of reranking models due to a broader range of available contexts. The disadvantage of the deep-judged datasets might be mitigated by a larger number of negative training examples.

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Gabriel Iturra-Bocaz, Danny Vo, Petra Galuscakova. 2025-06-29. Impact of Shallow vs. Deep Relevance Judgments on BERT-based Reranking Models. https://doi.org/10.1145/3731120.3744602

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