Large Language Models can Accurately Predict Searcher Preferences
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the evaluation and tuning of a search system relies on relevance labels---annotations that say whether a document is useful for a given search and searcher. Ideally these come from real searchers, but it is hard to collect this data at scale, so typical experiments rely on third-party labellers who may or may not produce accurate annotations. Label quality is managed with ongoing auditing, training, and monitoring. We discuss an alternative approach. We take careful feedback from real searchers and use this to select a large language model (LLM), and prompt, that agrees with this feedback; the LLM can then produce labels at scale. Our experiments show LLMs are as accurate as human labellers and as useful for finding the best systems and hardest queries. LLM performance varies with prompt features, but also varies unpredictably with simple paraphrases. This unpredictability reinforces the need for high-quality "gold" labels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it