Towards Efficient and Effective Query Variant Generation

Relevance modeling and data fusion are powerful yet simple approaches to improving the effectiveness of Information Retrieval Systems. For many of the classic TREC test collections, these approaches were used in many of the top performing retrieval systems. However, these approaches are often inefficient and are therefore rarely applied in production systems which must adhere to strict performance guarantees. Inspired by our recent work with human derived query variations, we propose a new sampling-based system which provides significantly better efficiency-effectiveness tradeoffs while leveraging both relevance modeling and data fusion. We show that our new end-to-end search system approaches the state-of-the-art in effectiveness while still being efficient in practice. Orthogonally, we also show how to leverage query expansion and data fusion to achieve significantly better risk-reward trade-offs than plain relevance modeling approaches.