A Workbench for Autograding Retrieve/Generate Systems

Abstract: This resource paper addresses the challenge of evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems in the era of autoregressive LLMs. Traditional methods relying on passage-level judgments are no longer effective due to the diversity of responses generated by LLM-based systems. We provide a workbench to explore several alternative evaluation approaches to judge the relevance of a system's response that incorporate LLMs: 1. Asking an LLM whether the response is relevant; 2. Asking the LLM which set of nuggets (i.e., relevant key facts) is covered in the response; 3. Asking the LLM to answer a set of exam questions with the response. This workbench aims to facilitate the development of new, reusable test collections. Researchers can manually refine sets of nuggets and exam questions, observing their impact on system evaluation and leaderboard rankings. Resource available at https://github.com/TREMA-UNH/autograding-workbench