Participation in TREC 2020 COVID Track Using Continuous Active Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We describe our participation in all five rounds of the TREC 2020 COVID Track (TREC-COVID). The goal of TREC-COVID is to contribute to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by identifying answers to many pressing questions and building infrastructure to improve search systems [8]. All five rounds of this Track challenged participants to perform a classic ad-hoc search task on the new data collection CORD-19. Our solution addressed this challenge by applying the Continuous Active Learning model (CAL) and its variations. Our results showed us to be amongst the top scoring manual runs and we remained competitive within all categories of submissions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.032 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".