# SLEDGE-Z: A Zero-Shot Baseline for COVID-19 Literature Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.05987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05987/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [The Expando-Mono-Duo Design Pattern for Text Ranking with Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05667/) (2021)
- [MS MARCO: Benchmarking Ranking Models in the Large-Data Regime](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04021/) (2021)
- [On Cross-Lingual Retrieval with Multilingual Text Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11031/) (2021)
- [Benchmark datasets driving artificial intelligence development fail to capture the needs of medical professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07040/) (2022)
- [Domain-Specific Pretraining for Vertical Search: Case Study on Biomedical Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13375/) (2021)
- [Multistage BiCross encoder for multilingual access to COVID-19 health information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03013/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With worldwide concerns surrounding the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is a rapidly growing body of scientific literature on the virus. Clinicians, researchers, and policy-makers need to be able to search these articles effectively. In this work, we present a zero-shot ranking algorithm that adapts to COVID-related scientific literature. Our approach filters training data from another collection down to medical-related queries, uses a neural re-ranking model pre-trained on scientific text (SciBERT), and filters the target document collection. This approach ranks top among zero-shot methods on the TREC COVID Round 1 leaderboard, and exhibits a P@5 of 0.80 and an nDCG@10 of 0.68 when evaluated on both Round 1 and 2 judgments. Despite not relying on TREC-COVID data, our method outperforms models that do. As one of the first search methods to thoroughly evaluate COVID-19 search, we hope that this serves as a strong baseline and helps in the global crisis.