Webis Group

@webis.de

Information is nothing without retrieval The Webis Group contributes to information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and symbolic AI.

Our paper on self-distillation for training bi-encoders got accepted at #ICTIR2025! By exploiting pretrained encoder capabilities, our approach eliminates expensive teacher models and batch sampling while maintaining the same effectiveness.

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Can LLM-generated ads be blocked? With OpenAI adding shopping options to ChatGPT, this question gains further importance. If you are interested in contributing to the research on LLM-based advertising, please check out our shared task: touche.webis.de/clef25/touch... More details below.

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📢 Our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" has been accepted to #SIGIR2025 ! We compared how good humans and LLMs are at writing and judging RAG responses, assembling 1800+ responses across 3 styles, and 47K+ pairwise judgments in 7 quality dimensions. 🧵➡️

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In our experiments, LLMs struggle with the task in a zero-shot setting, especially due to low precision values. Sentence transformers, however, can be finetuned to successfully detect the inserted ads and achieve precision and recall values of above 0.9 for unseen meta topics. https://t.co/VuuaW...

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The Webis Generated Native Ads 2024 is the first public dataset to evaluate models on the task of detecting ads in responses of conversational search engines. It was created by simulating an advertising service for queries from popular meta topics (product/service categories). https://t.co/pjHr...

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Today, we were happy to welcome @anja_reu and @juliusgonsior to our seminar to learn about current challenges in math retrieval/active learning: "Transformer Encoders for Mathematical Answer Retrieval" and "The Missing Piece of Active Learning Research: a Reference Benchmark". https://t.co/eh4IH...

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Our @H1iReimer and @maik_froebe are thrilled to present two new resources at the @SIGIRConf poster session: • The TIREx platform to run reproducible, blinded IR experiments & shared tasks 🧪 • The Archive Query Log, 350M queries crawled from the Internet Archive 🔍 #SIGIR2023 https://t.co/Np...

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