Retrieval Consistency in the Presence of Query Variations
Peter Bailey, Alistair Moffat, Falk Scholer, Paul Thomas · 2017
A search engine that can return the ideal results for a person's information need, independent of the specific query that is used to express that need, would be preferable to one that is overly swayed by the individual terms used; search engines should be consistent in the presence of syntactic query variations responding to the same information need. In this paper we examine the retrieval consistency of a set of five systems responding to syntactic query variations over one hundred topics, working with the UQV100 test collection, and using Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) relative to a centroid ranking over the query variations per topic as a measure of consistency. We also introduce a new data fusion algorithm, Rank-Biased Centroid (RBC), for constructing a centroid ranking over a set of rankings from query variations for a topic. RBC is compared with alternative data fusion algorithms.