BEIR CQADupStack — GIS (orgrctera/beir_cqadupstack_gis)

Overview

This release packages the GIS slice of CQADupStack from the BEIR (Benchmarking IR) benchmark as a table-oriented dataset for retrieval evaluation and tooling (e.g. Langfuse-exported runs).

CQADupStack is a collection of duplicate-question retrieval benchmarks built from Stack Exchange communities. Each subforum (including Geographic Information Systems, gis) provides a corpus of posts and queries paired with relevance judgments (qrels): for a given question, the task is to retrieve other posts marked as duplicates (or duplicate-related) in the original cQA annotations.

The GIS forum covers GIS software, spatial analysis, mapping APIs (e.g. QGIS, ArcGIS, PostGIS, web mapping), and related workflows—so queries and documents mix technical jargon, tool names, and problem descriptions, which is typical for community Q&A IR.

BEIR standardizes CQADupStack into per-subforum configurations (e.g. cqadupstack/android, cqadupstack/gis). This Hub dataset is the CTERA-formatted gis test collection: one row per query with gold relevant document IDs in expected_output, aligned with BEIR’s CQADupStack/gis split.

Source lineage: CQADupStack (Melbourne) → BEIR cqadupstack (sub-corpus gis) → orgrctera/beir_cqadupstack_gis.

Task

• Task type: Retrieval — duplicate-question retrieval on the CQADupStack GIS subforum (BEIR naming: CQADupStack/gis).
• Input (input): A query string: the text of a Stack Exchange question (natural language).
• Reference (expected_output): A JSON string: list of objects {"id": "…", "score": 1} (BEIR corpus document id in the id field) — binary relevance from BEIR qrels (duplicate or duplicate-related judgments as packaged by BEIR).
• Metadata: metadata.query_id is the BEIR query identifier; metadata.split is test (this release mirrors the BEIR test split for gis).

The retrieval system is evaluated by ranking the full BEIR GIS corpus (not stored row-wise here) and comparing retrieved IDs to these gold lists using standard IR metrics (nDCG@k, MAP, Recall@k, etc.), consistent with BEIR evaluation.

Background

CQADupStack (original dataset)

CQADupStack (Hoogeveen, Verspoor & Baldwin, ADCS 2015) is a benchmark for community question answering research. It aggregates threads from twelve Stack Exchange sites from a 2014 data dump, with annotations linking duplicate questions. The resource supports both retrieval and classification experiments and includes standard splits for reproducibility.

Abstract (paraphrased): The authors present CQADupStack, a new benchmark dataset for research on duplicate question detection and retrieval in community forums, based on Stack Exchange and designed to support rigorous comparison of methods across subcommunities.

BEIR reformulation

BEIR (Thakur et al., NeurIPS 2021 Datasets & Benchmarks) repackages CQADupStack subforums as separate retrieval configurations. Each has a corpus (JSONL: _id, title, text), queries (JSONL), and qrels (TSV). The GIS subset targets geospatial Q&A: vocabulary and semantics differ from e.g. programming-only forums, which helps measure domain transfer for retrievers.

This release

Rows were exported from Langfuse (CTERA AI evaluation pipeline) in a flat schema: 885 test queries for gis, each with gold document IDs in expected_output.

Data fields

Column	Type	Description
id	string	Stable UUID for this row in this Hub release.
input	string	Query text (duplicate-question retrieval query).
expected_output	string	JSON string: list of objects with BEIR corpus id and binary score (typically 1).
metadata.query_id	string	BEIR query identifier for this row.
metadata.split	string	Split name (test).

Splits

Split	Rows
test	885

Examples

Example 1 — single gold document

• input: qgis2 slope analysis from NED data gives crazy histogram
• metadata.query_id: 79803
• metadata.split: test
• expected_output:

[{"id": "91868", "score": 1}]

Example 2 — multiple gold documents

• input: Hardware requirements for a modern GIS workstation
• metadata.query_id: 112391
• expected_output:

[
  {"id": "22371", "score": 1},
  {"id": "29168", "score": 1},
  {"id": "23118", "score": 1}
]

Example 3 — PostGIS / spatial query

• input: Using PostGIS to find airplanes flying on the same routes over the sea
• metadata.query_id: 89922
• expected_output:

[{"id": "59729", "score": 1}]

References and citations

BEIR benchmark

Nandan Thakur, Nils Reimers, Andreas Rücklé, Abhishek Srivastava, Iryna Gurevych. BEIR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models. NeurIPS 2021 Datasets and Benchmarks Track.

• Paper: OpenReview · arXiv:2104.08663
• Code: beir-cellar/beir

@inproceedings{thakur2021beir,
  title={{BEIR}: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models},
  author={Thakur, Nandan and Reimers, Nils and R{\"u}ckl{\'e}, Andreas and Srivastava, Abhishek and Gurevych, Iryna},
  booktitle={Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track (Round 2)},
  year={2021},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=wCu6T5xFjeJ}
}

CQADupStack (original dataset)

Doris Hoogeveen, Karin M. Verspoor, Timothy D. Baldwin. CQADupStack: A Benchmark Data Set for Community Question-Answering Research. Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS), 2015.

• Resource page: University of Melbourne — CQADupStack
• Anthology: IR Anthology ADCS 2015

@inproceedings{hoogeveen2015cqadupstack,
  title={{CQADupStack}: A Benchmark Data Set for Community Question-Answering Research},
  author={Hoogeveen, Doris and Verspoor, Karin M. and Baldwin, Timothy D.},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Document Computing Symposium},
  year={2015}
}

Stack Exchange licensing

Underlying content is subject to Stack Exchange CC BY-SA terms; see Stack Exchange data licensing.