Australia–Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme

We are one of the 45 projects awarded funding under the Universities Australia – DAAD Joint Research Co-operation Scheme. This scheme facilitates the exchange of early career researchers in Australia and Germany from early 2023 until the end of 2024.

Due to their low efficiency, neural retrieval models are usually evaluated on small corpora (e.g. MS MARCO or BEIR subsets) or in re-ranking scenarios using a more efficient first-stage retriever. To estimate their effectiveness on larger corpora independently of a first-stage retriever, we propose a new corpus subsampling strategy based on the top-k results of the pooled systems that contributed to the relevance judgments of a corpus.

Awarded Best Short Paper! Cross-encoders distilled from large language models (LLMs) are often more effective re-rankers than cross-encoders fine-tuned on manually labeled data. However, distilled models do not match the effectiveness of their teacher LLMs.

Awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention! Existing cross-encoder models can be categorized as pointwise, pairwise, or listwise. Pairwise and listwise models allow passage interactions, which typically makes them more effective than pointwise models but less efficient and less robust to input passage order permutations.

Systematic reviews are crucial for evidence-based medicine as they comprehensively analyse published research findings on specific questions. Conducting such reviews is often resource- and time-intensive, especially in the screening phase, where abstracts of publications are assessed for inclusion in a review.

Screening prioritisation in medical systematic reviews aims to rank the set of documents retrieved by complex Boolean queries. Prioritising the most important documents ensures that subsequent review steps can be carried out more efficiently and effectively.

Systematic reviews are comprehensive literature reviews for a highly focused research question. These reviews are considered the highest form of evidence in medicine. Complex Boolean queries are developed as part of the systematic review creation process to retrieve literature, as they permit reproducibility and understandability.