Mihai Surdeanu

Query Expansion Is More Than Generation: Improving Dense Retrieval through Better Integration

This work introduces AnchorQE, a training-free method that separately encodes the original query and its expansion before interpolating them, and shows that AnchorQE improves retrieval effectiveness by up to 12.89% when compared to widely-used expansion-only or text-level concatenation baselines across TREC-DL, LoTTE, and BEIR.