ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09260v1
• Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:41:01 GMT
• Title: ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process
• Authors: Yibin Lei, Tao Shen, Andrew Yates,
• Abstract summary: ThinkQE is a test-time query expansion framework that encourages deeper and comprehensive semantic exploration.<n>We show ThinkQE consistently outperforms prior approaches, including training-intensive dense retrievers and rerankers.
• Score: 18.170948352149292
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Effective query expansion for web search benefits from promoting both exploration and result diversity to capture multiple interpretations and facets of a query. While recent LLM-based methods have improved retrieval performance and demonstrate strong domain generalization without additional training, they often generate narrowly focused expansions that overlook these desiderata. We propose ThinkQE, a test-time query expansion framework addressing this limitation through two key components: a thinking-based expansion process that encourages deeper and comprehensive semantic exploration, and a corpus-interaction strategy that iteratively refines expansions using retrieval feedback from the corpus. Experiments on diverse web search benchmarks (DL19, DL20, and BRIGHT) show ThinkQE consistently outperforms prior approaches, including training-intensive dense retrievers and rerankers.

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