Retrieval consistency in the presence of qery variations

Abstract

© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 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 o..