The THUIR team participates in the English subtask of the NTCIR-16 We Want Web with CENTRE(WWW-4) task. This paper elaborates on our methods and discusses the experimental results. We adopt three methods, namely learning-to-rank models, a pre-trained language model tailored for information retrieval, and BERT with prompt learning. Experimental results demonstrate the importance of designing pre-training task specifically for information retrieval. Results also suggest the relatively simple prompt method cannot effectively improve the ranking performance.
Yang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.