Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs.

@inproceedings{gienapp-2026-topicspecific, author = {Lukas Gienapp and Gangfeng Ye and Martin Potthast and Andrew Yates and Yueguo Chen and Eugene Yang and Xu Chen and Andrew Yates and Yueguo Chen and Harrisen Scells and Saisai Gong and Gangfeng Ye and Martin Potthast and Harrisen Scells and Saisai Gong and Eugene Yang and Xu Chen}, editor = {Hannah Bast and Alistair Moffat and Falk Scholer and Marc Najork and Min Zhang and Hannah Bast and Marc Najork and Min Zhang}, title = {{Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs}}, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2026, MelbourneVICAustralia, July 20-24, 2026}}, pages = {415--425}, publisher = {ACM}, year = {2026}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3809713}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3809713} }