{"id":417656,"date":"2017-09-04T21:58:48","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T04:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=417656"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:08:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:08:40","slug":"retrieval-consistency-presence-query-variations","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/retrieval-consistency-presence-query-variations\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrieval consistency in the presence of query variations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A search engine that can return the ideal results for a person&#8217;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 <em>consistent<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Our results indicate that consistency is positively correlated to a moderate degree with &#8220;deep&#8221; relevance measures. However, it is only weakly correlated with &#8220;shallow&#8221; relevance measures, as well as measures of topic complexity and variety in query expression. These findings support the notion that consistency is an independent property of a search engine&#8217;s retrieval effectiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A search engine that can return the ideal results for a person&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"Proceedings of the International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 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