A Probabilistic Fusion Framework

There are numerous methods for fusing document lists retrieved from the same corpus in response to a query. Many of these methods are based on seemingly unrelated techniques and heuristics. Herein we present a probabilistic framework for the fusion task. The framework provides a formal basis for deriving and explaining many fusion approaches and the connections between them. Instantiating the framework using various estimates yields novel fusion methods, some of which significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches.