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Fusion Functions for Hybrid Vector Search (arxiv.org)
1 point by gk1 on Jul 12, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Hybrid search blends keyword matching with meaning-based search; it compares averaging their scores with a fixed weight against merging by rank. Score averaging won in familiar and new domains and needed just a few examples to tune; rank merging was sensitive to its settings.

Abstract · An Analysis of Fusion Functions for Hybrid Retrieval

We study hybrid search in text retrieval where lexical and semantic search are fused together with the intuition that the two are complementary in how they model relevance. In particular, we examine fusion by a convex combination (CC) of lexical and semantic scores, as well as the Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) method, and identify their advantages and potential pitfalls. Contrary to existing studies, we find RRF to be sensitive to its parameters; that the learning of a CC fusion is generally agnostic to the choice of score normalization; that CC outperforms RRF in in-domain and out-of-domain settings; and finally, that CC is sample efficient, requiring only a small set of training examples to tune its only parameter to a target domain.

Sebastian Bruch, Siyu Gai, Amir Ingber
arXiv:2210.11934 · cs.IR · submitted Oct 21, 2022 · updated May 4, 2023
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