ComLQ: Benchmarking Complex Logical Queries in Information Retrieval

Abstract: Information retrieval (IR) systems play a critical role in navigating information overload across various applications. Existing IR benchmarks primarily focus on simple queries that are semantically analogous to single- and multi-hop relations, overlooking \emph{complex logical queries} involving first-order logic operations such as conjunction ($\land$), disjunction ($\lor$), and negation ($\lnot$). Thus, these benchmarks can not be used to sufficiently evaluate the performance of IR models on complex queries in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel method leveraging LLMs to construct a new IR dataset \textbf{ComLQ} for \textbf{Com}plex \textbf{L}ogical \textbf{Q}ueries, which comprises 2,909 queries and 11,251 candidate passages. A key challenge in constructing the dataset lies in capturing the underlying logical structures within unstructured text. Therefore, by designing the subgraph-guided prompt with the subgraph indicator, an LLM (such as GPT-4o) is guided to generate queries with specific logical structures based on selected passages. All query-passage pairs in ComLQ are ensured \emph{structure conformity} and \emph{evidence distribution} through expert annotation. To better evaluate whether retrievers can handle queries with negation, we further propose a new evaluation metric, \textbf{Log-Scaled Negation Consistency} (\textbf{LSNC@$K$}). As a supplement to standard relevance-based metrics (such as nDCG and mAP), LSNC@$K$ measures whether top-$K$ retrieved passages violate negation conditions in queries. Our experimental results under zero-shot settings demonstrate existing retrieval models' limited performance on complex logical queries, especially on queries with negation, exposing their inferior capabilities of modeling exclusion.