Reasoning About Query Difficulty to Predict Retrieval Effectiveness

Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Negar Arabzadeh, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri
January 2026
Type
Conference paper
Publication
Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (Short Paper)
Information Retrieval Query Performance Prediction Query Difficulty Large Language Models
Morteza Zihayat
Morteza Zihayat
Principal Investigator

Dr. Morteza Zihayat is a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Human-Centered AI and Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science. He also holds appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo (Management Sciences) and IBM Faculty Fellow at IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. He is the Director of the Human-Centered Machine Intelligence Lab.