Retrievability Bias Estimation Using Synthetically Generated Queries

Abstract

Ranking with pre-trained language models (PLMs) has shown to be highly effective for various Information Retrieval tasks. However, there is no prior work on evaluating PLM-based rankers in terms of their retrievability bias. In this work, we compare the retrievability bias in two of the most common PLM-based rankers, a Bi-Encoder BERT ranker and a Cross-Encoder BERT re-ranker against BM25, which was found to be one of the least biased models in prior work. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments with which we explore the plausibility of using synthetic queries generated with a generative model, docT5query, in the evaluation of retrievability bias. Our experiments show promising results on the use of synthetically generated queries for the purpose of retrievability bias estimation. Moreover, we find that the estimated bias values resulting from synthetically generated queries are lower than the ones estimated with user-generated queries on the MS MARCO evaluation benchmark. This indicates that synthetically generated queries might cause less bias than user-generated queries and therefore, by using such queries in training PLM-based rankers, we might be able to reduce the retrievability bias in these models.